oh. so i get it now. you have to refactor your class (change
member variable names and also do it in all places where they
are used througout the class. then add new methods, overloading
them in this way and that way, all because you're initial
design never factored in the possibility of change (or even
some validation of the vale being returned to the client, or
validation of value coming from the client).
after 10 years of doing all that, you may well come to the
conclusion that public member variables are not such a great
idea afterall ;-)
These days with modern IDEs it takes a second to change the name
of a variable globally. In production level code, it may take
more time, but I doubt by a lot.
Think about it, if you have a class with 20 different variables
that don't need any special rules to access, think about the
amount of code you would have to add for getters/setters. Now in
production level code you will have thousands of these classes,
and as such you will have a good chunk of code that is
practically useless and doing nothing.
