When Swift's access controls were introduced I wrote about how they worked like C's with good use of internal and external headers. I've recently been asked about how to do access private properties when subclassing and thought it would be worth sharing the conversation.
If you are new to Swift's access controls I suggest you look at the previous post (same link as above) first as this is the refinement and conclusion (in my mind) of an issue that I an open question when I wrote that. If you are new to programming then this post is probably one to skip as it is more about comparing how things can be done in Swift that people are used to doing a certain way in Java than something meant as an introduction to the concepts.
I’ve a question in context of open/closed principle (Software entitles should be open for extension but closed for modification.), coming from Java, AS3 background highly influenced by the Design Patterns book by the Gang of Four, the way I see protected is so that work can be extended by other people.
How can I fully extend a class in it’s entirety without access to it’s private members, surely I can override methods but that won’t be enough.
The only way I could think is to approach this by declaring everything public or have a getter setter for each but then I’m violating “Encapsulation” principle
The
short version is I would design the system in such a way to avoid
requiring any inheritance apart from the specifically designed to
inherit from system classes (NSObject, UIView, UIViewController etc.).