Re: Getting Current Working Directory

>From: Eric Bezault <ericb-D6Qt/9opevxWk0Htik3J/[email protected]>
>No, don't try that. {KL_OPERATING_SYSTEM}.current_working_directory
>is not exported because it's used for implementation purposes...
>
>Yes Peter, I know, this should be documented somewhere so that
>newbies don't waste their time trying to figure out what to do
>in order to get the current working directory... ;-)

Actually, Eric, this is an interesting case.

Under the influence of OOSC2 five years ago, I took the radical step of 
never declaring my Delphi class features 'private'. I had already suffered 
often from being unable to access an ancestor class's privates, resorting to 
nasty hacks in order to make my class work. (In one case, I had to copy and 
paste hundred of lines of code from the ancestor class.) Henceforth, every 
feature of every class I wrote was 'protected' or 'public'. To my great 
surprise and delight, it worked beautifully.

But then, two years ago, I was working in C# with people who were convinced 
that implementation features should be inaccessible to descendants. They 
argued that:
(a) 'private' makes it easier for them to change or remove these 
implementation features, without concerning themselves that someone may have 
written a descendant that uses them;
(b) because 'private' reduces the number of features visible to decendant 
classes, it helps writers of descendant classes learn which features they 
should to call or redefine.

This reasoning is contrary to the open-closed principle, so I argued 
argainst it, unsuccessfully. I consulted OOSC2 to refute these arguments, 
but I only found an assertion that the literature contains no clear adivce 
on when to use 'private'.

It's interesting to see the issue arising in the context of an Eiffel 
library.

- Peter Gummer

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