ABSTRACT
It is very important to remember that the purpose of information-hiding and encapsulation is to improve maintainability of code. It is equally important to realize that the purpose is not to deny information to people; that is, information-hiding and “open source” are not mutually exclusive! Information-hiding is a means of denying other modules direct access to a given module’s information. The access-restricted, or “hidden,” information can only be accessed by other modules via calls to methods, or “access programs,” of the encapsulating module. Information-hiding was never intended to hide information from people.2
