From: Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair@...>
Date: 2002-09-06T10:58:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby aesthetics

> Hi,
>
> In message "Re: Ruby aesthetics"
>     on 02/09/06, Christian Szegedy <szegedy@nospam.or.uni-bonn.de>
> writes:
>
> |What I really dislike in Ruby, that the data members are seen
> |by the child classes. This is a very serious issue, and a claer
> |violation of object-orientation.
> |
> |I think Ruby would be a much better language if the instance
> |variables would only live per class and not per hierarchy...
>
> It's in the ToDo list.  Private instance variables will be something
> like @_foo.  But it's pretty hard to implement.  If someone come up with
> a good idea, I'm glad to hear.
>
> 							matz.

I'm not too well versed in the principles of data hiding in inheritance
hierarchiesm, but the explanation of how it's done in C++ (was it by
Christian?) was pretty convincing to me.

Therefore, I think private should be the default.  Maybe have a keyword to
indicate which data members are visible up the chain.  Or just rely on
accessor methods.

My 1c.

Gavin