Well, you wrote:
The client only does stuff through the accessors, so you don't have the coercion issues.
which sounds specific enough to me, and that was what I argued against.

You are right about that it's good to do the design first (if only all programmers would). It's also good to have an API, but that's already implied if you are using an ADT, because it wouldn't be much of an ADT if you'd poke around in the datastructure outside of defined set of functions. However, you do not need objects to be able to deal with ADTs. Your password file can be seen as an ADT which you access via the *pwent set of functions.

Abigail


In reply to Re: Help with ADT by Abigail-II
in thread Help with ADT by dimmesdale

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