Why use getters and setters/accessors?

There are actually many good reasons to consider using accessors rather than directly exposing fields of a class – beyond just the argument of encapsulation and making future changes easier.

Here are the some of the reasons I am aware of:

  • Encapsulation of behavior associated with getting or setting the property – this allows additional functionality (like validation) to be added more easily later.
  • Hiding the internal representation of the property while exposing a property using an alternative representation.
  • Insulating your public interface from change – allowing the public interface to remain constant while the implementation changes without affecting existing consumers.
  • Controlling the lifetime and memory management (disposal) semantics of the property – particularly important in non-managed memory environments (like C++ or Objective-C).
  • Providing a debugging interception point for when a property changes at runtime – debugging when and where a property changed to a particular value can be quite difficult without this in some languages.
  • Improved interoperability with libraries that are designed to operate against property getter/setters – Mocking, Serialization, and WPF come to mind.
  • Allowing inheritors to change the semantics of how the property behaves and is exposed by overriding the getter/setter methods.
  • Allowing the getter/setter to be passed around as lambda expressions rather than values.
  • Getters and setters can allow different access levels – for example the get may be public, but the set could be protected.

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