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copied!<p>Information hiding (encapsulation) is a good thing since it reduces the possibility of clients using "undocumented" information.</p> <p>The whole point of encapsulation is to minimise the interface to your code so that you can change the non-published bits whenever you want without affecting clients of it.</p> <p>For example, let's say you have a dictionary class which maps one string to another. Let's further say that you implemented this as a quick and dirty two-array solution because you were behind schedule - apparently this happens sometimes :-) And that you didn't encapsulate the array and methods that use it.</p> <p>So, it's been in the field for a while and millions of customers have bought it. Half of them are complaining about the speed since their dictionaries have a hundred thousand entries.</p> <p>The other half are using it by going behind your back and directly using your internal, but unhidden data structures.</p> <p>What do you do? If you do nothing, half a million of your customers will not renew their contracts and they will bad-mouth your product.</p> <p>If you change your code to use a balanced tree or hashing, the <em>other</em> half million customers will moan about your decision.</p> <p>Here's what you end up doing. You end up maintaining <em>two</em> versions, one for the large-data people, the other for the sneaky people. This increases your costs and effort considerably.</p> <p>If you had properly encapsulated your data and methods, you could have replaced the internals wholesale with absolutely no impact on any of your customers.</p>

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