Uniform access principle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Uniform Access Principle was put forth by Bertrand Meyer. It states "All services offered by a module should be available through a uniform notation, which does not betray whether they are implemented through storage or through computation." This principle applies generally to object-oriented programming languages. In simpler form, it states that there should be no difference between working with an attribute, precomputed property, or method/query.
While most examples focus on the "read" aspect of the principle, Meyer shows that the "write" implications of the principle are harder to deal with in his monthly column on the Eiffel programming language official website.
Many languages have various degrees of support for UAP, where some of the implementations violate the spirit of UAP. The inclusion of 'properties' in some programming languages is another way address the problem that Meyer discusses. Properties don't provide a uniform notation, but they do make the call to the method which provides a service opaque.
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[edit] UAP Example
If a language allows access to a variable via dot-notation and assignment
Foo.bar = 5 //Assigns 5 to the object variable "bar"
then these operations should be the same :
//Assume print displays the variable passed to it, with or without parens //Assume Foo.bar = 5 for now print Foo.bar print Foo.bar()
When executed, should display :
5 5
This allows the object to still hide information as well as being easy to access.
The same should be true for setting the data.
Foo.bar = 5 Foo.bar(5) //These should achieve the same goal
[edit] Language Examples
[edit] Ruby
class Foo attr_reader :x def initialize(x) @x = x end def squared_x return @x * @x end end y = Foo.new(2) puts y.x puts y.squared_x
This outputs:
2 4
Note how even though x is an attribute and squared_x is a parameterless method call, they are accessed the same way.
[edit] Python
class Foo(object): def __init__(self, x): self.setx(x) def getx(self): return self.__x def setx(self, x): self.__x = x def getsquared_x(self): return self.x * self.x x = property(getx, doc="getter for x") squared_x = property(getsquared_x, doc="getter for squared x") y = Foo(2) print y.x print y.squared_x
This outputs:
2 4
Python properties can be used to achieve UAP. This method of using properties to map other functions to variable access matches Meyer's idea of UAP closely (Eiffel uses a similar mechanism).
[edit] PHP
class Foo{ private $x; function __construct($x){ $this->x = $x; } function x(){ return $this->x; } function squared_x(){ return $this->x * $this->x; } } $y = new Foo(2); echo $y->x(); echo $y->squared_x();
This outputs:
2 4
Observation: There are many other ways to achieve the same functionality in PHP, for example making x public and accessing it directly or using magic methods function __get($variable)
