Scala why default public

By protecting the access parts of your application, you reduce the entry points of your package, which makes it easier to use. By doing so, you can also prevent external manipulations that could expose sensitive data or introduce undesired behavior.

In this lesson, you will learn about the Scala access modifiers, which are reserved keywords to change the visibility of your code elements. This means extra typing to encapsulate the fields and methods whether it be private, scoped private, protected, access.

In Scala you can choose between public access public , package-private access with inheritance protected[C] , package-private access without inheritance private[C] , class-private access private , object-private access private[this] , inheritance access protected , protected[this] access whatever you may call it and, additionally, you have some kind of file-private access modifier sealed.

Scala has far more flexibility in choosing the visibility of something than Java, though some of Java visibility rules, related to nested classes are not translatable into Scala. And, yes, there is package-private in Scala. It is written as private[package] in Scala. The reason why Scala makes public the default is because it is the most common visibility used.

The "extra typing" is actually less typing, because it is far more uncommon to make members private or protected. One exception to that rule in Java is fields, which should be made private so one may be able to change details of implementation without breaking clients. One practical consequence of this are classes with fields and then getters and setters for each field.

In Scala, because one may be able to replace a val or a var with corresponding def , this is not needed. This is something that gives a lot of people some trouble. I'd suggest giving this entry actually the entire series a read. Immutability also prevents any of the funnies that generally occur with such access. It might be true that "there is more typing", but looking at IDEs, they are responsible for a lot of fud as any generated method by the IDE is usually public, which is not always valid either.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Collectives on Stack Overflow. Learn more. Default public access in scala Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 10 months ago. Classes in Scala are blueprints for creating objects.

They can contain methods, values, variables, types, objects, traits, and classes which are collectively called members. Types, objects, and traits will be covered later in the tour. A minimal class definition is simply the keyword class and an identifier. Class names should be capitalized. The keyword new is used to create an instance of the class. User has a default constructor which takes no arguments because no constructor was defined.

Here is an example class definition for a point:.