Software is commonly very large and complex, and consequently hard to develop, understand and maintain. Encapsulation is the practice of breaking a system up into well-defined pieces and hiding internal details within each piece. It supports modularisation and information hiding, making it one of the most fundamental tools software developers have for managing complexity. Object oriented design...

Encapsulation is a major concept in object-oriented designs as design pattern catalogues, approaches for alias control, and the need for modular correctness of components demonstrate. The way encapsulation can be formally specified in existing approaches has several shortcomings. We show how encapsulation in sequential Java programs is specified by means of a new concept, called encapsulation p...

Two schools of thought underpin the way OO programming languages support encapsulation. Object encapsulation ensures that private members are accessible only within a single object. Class encapsulation allows private members to be accessed by other objects of the same class. This paper describes an empirical investigation into the way encapsulation is used in practice in class encapsulation lan...

Information hiding or encapsulation is a protection mechanism which prevents users from directly accessing certain fields of an object. In many cases, particularly in persistent systems, it may be desirable to provide varying degrees of encapsulation of an object. This paper presents the mechanisms for controlling the encapsulation of objects in the Mozzie programming language. Encapsulation is...

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