Re: why are private classes private?

FROM : James Gregurich
DATE : Fri Jan 03 19:02:04 2003

good, precise answer.

Question: could there be implemented a way to subclass NSColor that
will work with the private subclasses of NSColor? that is a annoying
drawback of the design.


-James

On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 12:43  PM, Mike Ferris wrote:

> The answer to what it would hurt is "the flexibility of the
> framework".  Public API is immutable.  Private API can be changed if
> necessary.  For example, there used to be many many concrete
> subclasses of NSString.  They were all private and that meant that
> when CoreFoundation came along, all those private classes could be
> dumped in favor of a new one that interfaced with CFString.  Nobody's
> Cocoa code broke even though some pretty major changes were made.  If
> folks knew about and were using things like
> NSCheapMutableStringWithGap (or whatever) directly, this change could
> not have been done nearly as simply.
>
> This sort of thing goes on all the time.
>
> Mike


thanks,
James Gregurich