Object-Oriented Thought Process, The, Second Edition

Giving the User the Minimal Interface Possible

When designing a class, the rule of thumb is to always provide the user with as little knowledge of the inner workings of the class as possible. To accomplish this, follow these simple rules:

• Give the users only what they absolutely need. In effect, this means the class has as few interfaces as possible. When you start designing a class, start with a minimal interface. The design of a class is iterative, so you will soon discover that the minimal set of interfaces might not suffice. This is fine. It is better to have to add an interface because users really need it than to give the users more interfaces than they need.

  For the moment, let's use a hardware example to illustrate our software example. ...