And rightly so. You _should_ supply such methods. If there is any chance that someone outside of your module will need to access these methods/attributes then you should provide a method interface for them to do so.

However inside of your module, the one that manipulates the actual data structure, you can certainly make the design decision to use the underlying object implementation. After all it is your code and your implementation so the only one that you can burn is yourself.

For instance I completely bypass the method interface for my node objects in my Treap implementation. However my node is a subclass of a Class::Struct so that anything outside can have something more stable to utilize. (ie no nasty suprises for users that use the method interface).

Yves / DeMerphq
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Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. -- E. W. Dijkstra (RIP)