Survey of the Usage of Encapsulation in Object-Oriented Programming

• In object-oriented programming the concept of encapsulation is used to create abstract datatypes that should be possible to modify only through their external interface. One way to enforce this kind of encapsulation is to declare variables with different access modifiers, such as private or public. However, when using private variables in programming languages with reference semantics, such as e.g. Java, it is only the names of the variables that are protected, not the real objects pointed to by the variables. This problem is sometimes referred to as the representation exposure problem and many proposals addressing this problem have been presented. There is, however, a lack of empirical data on how widespread this problem is in the software industry and its effect on software quality. In this paper we report our finding from a questionnaire survey conducted among software engineers on their view on encapsulation and information hiding issues, their use of OO programming languages, their way of working and their opinions on tools and techniques supporting encapsulation, information hiding and representation exposure

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

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