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Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object. Encapsulation allows developers to present a consistent interface that is independent of its internal implementation. As one example, encapsulation can be used to hide the values or state of a structured data object inside a class.
In computer programming, field encapsulation involves providing methods that can be used to read from or write to the field rather than accessing the field directly. Sometimes these accessor methods are called getX and setX (where X is the field's name), which are also known as mutator methods.
Examples of such workarounds are: Make the parts' fields public. This solution decreases encapsulation by making it possible to violate invariants of the data-structure from outside. Move all mutable structural data away from the part to the data-structure, and introduce indirection back from each part to its data-structure.
For example, a relational database is encapsulated in the sense that its only public interface is a query language (such as SQL), which hides all the internal machinery and data structures of the database management system. As such, encapsulation is a core principle of good software architecture, at every level of granularity.
In object-oriented programming, a friend function, that is a "friend" of a given class, is a function that is given the same access as methods to private and protected data.
For example, if a date is represented by separate private year, month and day variables, then incoming dates can be split by the setDate mutator while for consistency the same private instance variables are accessed by setYear and setMonth. In all cases month values outside of 1 - 12 can be rejected by the same code.
In programming languages (especially functional programming languages) and type theory, an option type or maybe type is a polymorphic type that represents encapsulation of an optional value; e.g., it is used as the return type of functions which may or may not return a meaningful value when they are applied.
Data encapsulation, also known as data hiding, is the mechanism whereby the implementation details of a class are kept hidden from the user. The user can only perform a restricted set of operations on the hidden members of the class by executing special functions commonly called methods to prevent attributes of objects from being easily viewed and accessed.