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The Go Programming Language
book

The Go Programming Language

by Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan
October 2015
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
400 pages
14h 44m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from The Go Programming Language

6.6 Encapsulation

A variable or method of an object is said to be encapsulated if it is inaccessible to clients of the object. Encapsulation, sometimes called information hiding, is a key aspect of object-oriented programming.

Go has only one mechanism to control the visibility of names: capitalized identifiers are exported from the package in which they are defined, and uncapitalized names are not. The same mechanism that limits access to members of a package also limits access to the fields of a struct or the methods of a type. As a consequence, to encapsulate an object, we must make it a struct.

That’s the reason the IntSet type from the previous section was declared as a struct type even though it has only a single field:

type ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134190570Purchase book