Encapsulation - Principles of Object Oriented Design
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A brief introduction to the principle of encapsulation in object oriented software. Without encapsulation, all of the code has access to all of the data. This creates three problems. You have to check all of the code to find the cause of an incorrect data value, you cannot change the data structure without checking all of the code to find out what will be affected; and you cannot re-use the code because it is built around the whole data structure.