Interfaces, Friends, and th...

The .NET Framework has a lot of really great things in it. I've just started playing with a few corners of it, and I love the amount of stuff that it's got in it. Some things really irritate me, though, and it's a lot more satisfying to talk about that stuff!

C# and the CLR make it really hard to hide information. First of all, the .NET framework is built around inheritance. Everything is inherited from something else, and if you want to extend an object, then you're going to inherit, too. Inheritance hides almost nothing, but you already knew that, and, presumably, you don't use it as much as the programmers in Redmond.

That's not what I want to talk about here. I'm going to complain about the member access rights that C# and the CLR support.

In C#, there are four different member access rights. The usual private, protected, and public member access rights are supported. They also support "internal", which is the same as not exporting a function from your DLL in C++. The CLR supports one additional one called "Family and Assembly" which is the same as a protected member that is not exported from the DLL.

It's missing two extremely useful access rights, however. Java's package level scope and C++'s friendship. Both of these allow a programmer to grant access to a limited number of functions and classes. Java's package level scope is the optimal one, in my opinion. This allows a programmer to give limited access to a limited number of classes. Friendship allows complete access to individual classes and functions.

In the C# world, you're expected to grant public access to functions that should only be used by one other function outside your class. You're supposed to be happy about it, too!