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Getters and Setters

Neel Krishnaswami neelk at brick.cswv.com
Thu Jul 15 19:35:38 EDT 1999 
In article <000701bece99$6dbeede0$51a22299 at tim>,
Tim Peters <tim_one at email.msn.com> wrote:
>[Neil Schemenauer]
>> For those who are not familiar, CLOS (and Dylan) create a "getter"
>> and "setter" method for each attribute of a class. This saves the
>> programmer from writing "getX" and "setX" for every attribute when
>> no special action is needed.  Later, an explict method can be created
>> if needed.
>
>Python goes one better:  you can write an explicit method if needed, but it
>doesn't encourage bad practice by automatically supplying methods that
>expose every data attribute, crying "use me! abuse me!" <wink>.

Be fair, now -- Dylan doesn't try to do data hiding in the class
definition; it uses module export lists to determine what is visible
to users of the module. This isn't any worse that Python's leading-
underscore convention for data hiding.

Besides, Dylan has syntactically-significant whitespace just like
Python does, so it has to be a good language, right? :)

Neel
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