Abstract

ore painful than it has to be. ILLUSORY PROTECTION The term "protected" implies support for encapsulation. When you see it before a program component, such as a variable or method, you naturally assume that visibility to other components is restricted. That is the purpose of encapsulation---to guard the integrity of the protected component or the entity that owns it. Once components outside that visibility border have access to the protected member, that integrity cannot be guaranteed. This is the case in Java: The visibility hole for members specified as having protected access is so large that protection is merely an illusion. A similar problem occurs for class members not specified as having a particular access (protected, public, or private) . Like C++, in Java "protected" means access to other members of the same enclosing class and to members of its descendants via inheritance. Such access increases the coupling between class definitions, but w

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