Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Information hiding
Summary
In computer science, information hiding is the principle of segregation of the design decisions in a computer program that are most likely to change, thus protecting other parts of the program from extensive modification if the design decision is changed. The protection involves providing a stable interface which protects the remainder of the program from the implementation (whose details are likely to change). Written in another way, information hiding is the ability to prevent certain aspects of a class or software component from being accessible to its clients, using either programming language features (like private variables) or an explicit exporting policy.
The term encapsulation is often used interchangeably with information hiding. Not all agree on the distinctions between the two, though; one may think of information hiding as being the principle and encapsulation being the technique. A software module hides information by encapsulating the information into a module or other construct which presents an interface.
A common use of information hiding is to hide the physical storage layout for data so that if it is changed, the change is restricted to a small subset of the total program. For example, if a three-dimensional point (x, y, z) is represented in a program with three floating-point scalar variables and later, the representation is changed to a single array variable of size three, a module designed with information hiding in mind would protect the remainder of the program from such a change.
In object-oriented programming, information hiding (by way of nesting of types) reduces software development risk by shifting the code's dependency on an uncertain implementation (design decision) onto a well-defined interface. Clients of the interface perform operations purely through the interface, so, if the implementation changes, the clients do not have to change.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.