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An association represents a semantic relationship between instances of the associated classes. The member-end of an association corresponds to a property of the associated class. An aggregation is a kind of association that models a part/whole relationship between an aggregate (whole) and a group of related components (parts).
In software systems, encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with the mechanisms or methods that operate on the data. It may also refer to the limiting of direct access to some of that data, such as an object's components. [1] Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object.
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.
For example, a simple linearized object would consist of a length field, a code point identifying the class, and a data value. A more complex example would be a command consisting of the length and code point of the command and values consisting of linearized objects representing the command's parameters.
The term encapsulation refers to the hiding of state details, but extending the concept of data type from earlier programming languages to associate behavior most strongly with the data, and standardizing the way that different data types interact, is the beginning of abstraction.
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.
A data structure known as a hash table.. In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. [1] [2] [3] More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data, [4] i.e., it is an algebraic structure about data.
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.