[petsc-dev] How to enforce private data/methods in PETSc?

[Matthew Knepley]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2018 at 5:43 PM Junchao Zhang <jczhang at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

>  I met several bugs that remind me to raise this question. In PETSc,
> object of type A can arbitrarily access object of type B's data. But
> designer of B may later change the meaning of its data (and of course,
> update B's interfaces, which are usually local to few files). The designer
> may think the job is done, but actually it is not.  He/she has to grep the
> code to know where its data members are accessed (that is relatively easy
> to get) and what is the contract, for example, is an array assumed to be
> sorted (that is hard to know).  With C++, one can use private to minimize
> data exposure.
>

This just has to be coding discipline. People should not be accessing
private members.

   Matt


> --Junchao Zhang
>


-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener

https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/ <http://www.caam.rice.edu/~mk51/>
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