[Soot-list] Change default visibility in Soot to protected?

[Patrick Lam]

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Eric Bodden wrote:
> Hi all.
> 
> This is an email to fellow contributors to Soot. In the past there
> have often been problems with Soot because some internal fields were
> inaccessible, often because they used default visibility. With such
> visibility, a field is only visible to classes in the same package,
> but *not* to sub-classes. This can hinder extensibility.
> 
> Therefore I was wondering if we should do a batch change and change
> all default visible fields in Soot to being protected. Protected
> access makes a field visible to sub-classes *and* to the same package,
> so the change should only widen visibility.

I'm not sure such a change makes sense. Shouldn't we generally provide
accessor methods instead? Making these fields protected can make it
harder to reason about what a class is doing, since subclasses could
change its internal state unexpectedly.

I suggest that the best way to proceed is to look at a half dozen
examples of default-visibility fields and see if we can argue for a
sensible rule to follow in general.

pat


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