Hands-On Design Patterns and Best Practices with Julia

Discouraging direct field access

While getter and setter functions are convenient, it is easy to forget about these functions and so the program ends up accessing the fields directly. That would be too bad, as we have just spent all that effort creating getter and setter functions and they end up getting bypassed.

A possible solution is to discourage direct field access by renaming the fields to something that looks obviously private. A common convention is to prepend the field names with underscores.

For our example, we can redefine the struct as follows:

mutable struct Simulation{N}    _heatmap::Array{Float64, N}    _stats::NamedTuple{(:mean, :std)}end

These oddly named fields will then only be used within the implementation of the Simulation ...