In article <3d9c22b8@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   The problem with that is that returning a non-const reference to a
> member variable (which is of course private; if you see a member variable
> anywhere else than in the private part, then dump that code, it's crap)

Well, it is useful, but rarely. The only time I've ever used public 
variables is for the components in a 3D vector type, and a color type. 
My reasons: they are the only members, and are never going to change, 
and it makes code using these vectors a lot shorter and clearer. Speed 
isn't a factor, I expect any decent compiler to optimize the function 
calls away.
I do use "struct" instead of "class" to differentiate these...there is 
no real difference to the compiler other than default access level, but 
you will never see a class from me with a public variable. (unless it is 
something left over from debugging or some coding mistake)

Off the topic of this discussion, but another thing I've occasionally 
wished for was a way to specify specific methods as being exposed to 
objects of a class...friend classes are close, but are all-or-nothing. 
Sometimes there are two closely related classes that need to talk to 
each other, but the API between them doesn't need to be public and they 
don't need private access to each other. Maybe a way to group 
methods/data members into categories that can be exposed to specific 
classes. (category is a bad term, it is already used for something else 
in many OO languages and doesn't apply to C++, but I can't think of 
anything better)


> is against good OO coding practices, as it pretty much nullifies the whole
> purpose of keeping it in the private part of the class.
>   Reading and writing to that variable should be done eg. like this:

Exactly.


> > And I've never used the "?:" operator.
>   Why not? It's handy. :)

Never needed it. Expressions using it are much less readable IMO, and 
I've never had a situation where using if...else was significantly 
longer or more awkward.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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