The interface is the important thing. The interface is a big part of maintenance, because (presumably) the interface will be used in lots of code.

Your measurement of code complexity is deceiving. For each property, the only additional code is the new method, which is trivial. With more methods on an object, the overhead as a percent would shrink. The whole idea behind OO design is that it is intended for scalability, not that it can implement trivial things trivially.

All at the expense of performance and for what purpose again?
Expandability, for one. If you haven't anticipated all the functions that will be handy for your properties, you're stuck implementing them as additional operate_on_Doohickey type procedures unless you change all the Doohickey-related methods. Your Doohickey can never be a real boy object. I can just add the methods to the Doohickey package, and away they go. And if I have to debug it, my haystack is actually smaller, because it's modular.

I'm not saying it's always the way to go — I'm sure it's often not — but it is something to consider. You seem to be saying that it's never the way to go.


Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

In reply to Re^4: The Accessor Heresy by Roy Johnson
in thread The Accessor Heresy by Roy Johnson

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