CLASS ENCAPSULATION AND OBJECT ENCAPSULATION - An Empirical Study

Two schools of thought underpin the way OO programming languages support encapsulation. Object encapsulation \nensures that private members are accessible only within a single object. Class encapsulation allows \nprivate members to be accessed by other objects of the same class. This paper describes an empirical investigation \ninto the way encapsulation is used in practice in class encapsulation languages C# and Java. We \nfind arbitrary and inconsistent programming practices and suggest that object encapsulation is more intuitive \nand provides OO design advantages.