Encapsulation and information hiding are very closely linked concepts, though their precise definitions vary depending on who you talk to. The concept of “information hiding” was first described by Parnas (1972) who suggested that access to information should be restricted to reduce the interconnectedness of a system. He proposed that this would facilitate splitting of … Read more
Go to the source! Grady Booch says (in Object Oriented Analysis and Design, page 49, second edition): Abstraction and encapsulation are complementary concepts: abstraction focuses on the observable behavior of an object… encapsulation focuses upon the implementation that gives rise to this behavior… encapsulation is most often achieved through information hiding, which is the process … Read more
I think most people refer to this as the Handle Body idiom. See James Coplien’s book Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms. It’s also known as the Cheshire Cat because of Lewis Caroll’s character that fades away until only the grin remains. The example code should be distributed across two sets of source files. Then … Read more
The name scrambling is used to ensure that subclasses don’t accidentally override the private methods and attributes of their superclasses. It’s not designed to prevent deliberate access from outside. For example: >>> class Foo(object): … def __init__(self): … self.__baz = 42 … def foo(self): … print self.__baz … >>> class Bar(Foo): … def __init__(self): … … Read more