On 27/04/2011 21.55, Javier Guerra Giraldez wrote:
Fair enough. I just was way too sloppy with terminology (and probably too much emphatic when speaking of "tampering") :-P I really meant "data hiding". As for access control, I don't care really much about it (I don't need sandboxing or to operate with strict security constraints). I just want to make sure (cheaply - without too much coding) that the client won't accidentally overwrite a field or a method of my objects and to ensure that objects are opaque, just to better support the abstraction they represent. I like clean interfaces!On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@interfree.it> wrote:- the actual object is stored in the proxy table using a "private" index (the metatable itself) to achieve encapsulation and prevent the client from tampering with the object directly.as i understand it, encapsulation means having all relevant state within the same object. what you describe here is access control.
I agree on access control. As for Python, I used it for too short a time to make a meaningful comparison (never got to the point to learn its OO feature - when I was about to, I stumbled into Lua! :-D )IMHO, encapsulation is great for clean code; access control is overrated. (note that Python doesn't have it and they claim it to be a 'clean', 'readable', language)
Note: I don't need inheritance support, since almost always use this pattern to represent objects of "concrete classes".hurray!
:-D -- Lorenzo