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Possible Duplicate:
Are Getters and Setters evil?
I can’t find a logical reason behind having a private variable with a getter and a setter that does nothing but directly handling the value being preferable to having a public variable.
Am I missing something?
Because,
Validation is one reason. Keeping the field name out of the public API also allows you to change it later without breaking the API. And it allows you to change the class later in other ways as well, e.g. moving the field to some other class (so that the public setter would call a setter in a different class). Having the setter called also allows you to do other things, e.g. notify interested other components of the change of value. None of this would be possible if the field was accessed directly.