SWE 3633 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Information Hiding

• School: KSU
• Department: Software Engineering
• Course: SWE 3633
• Professor: Hassan Pournaghband

Document Summary

Information hiding - is a design principle discussed earlier that applies to every level of design. Information hiding is the hiding of design decisions in a system that are most likely to change so that other parts of the system will be minimally impacted should the design change. The techniques of information hiding includes: limiting visibility, not extending access. A program entity (a variable, a module, a class, a method, etc. ) is visible at some point in a program if it can be referred to by name at that point. The portion of the program where a program entity is visible is the entity"s visibility. Notion of accessibility: a program entity is accessible at a point in a program if it can be used (read or change its value) at that point, a program entity is accessible everywhere it is visible. But it may still be accessible when it is not visible.