Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

The advantages of compartmentalizing code

One important difference between procedural programming (think C-style) and object-oriented programming is the ability to encapsulate or compartmentalize code. Oftentimes we think of this as just data hiding: making variables private. In a C-style program, the functions and data are separate, but it is hard to reuse any one function because it might depend on other functions or other pieces of data in the program. In object-oriented programming, we are allowed to group the data and function together into reusable pieces. That means we can (hopefully) take a class or module and place it in a new project. This also means that since the data is private, a variable can be easily changed as long as the ...