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Paolo Scamardella
24,828 PointsIs this the reason why we don't have or use access modifiers in swift?
Coming from an OOP background with PHP, Java, and C#, it seems that swift does not or need access modifiers because value or reference semantics?
In other languages, we have private or protected keywords to encapsulate data, but after watch this video on value semantics, it doesn't make sense to have access modifiers since we can use the let keyword to control modifying data of an object...does this sound correct in swift?
1 Answer
Simon Di Giovanni
8,429 PointsI don’t have any experience with other programming languages, so I’m not sure about the use of access modifiers to ensure that values are immutable.
However with swift, if you have a value type with any ‘let’ constants, any object of that value type will have those immutable values. The same goes for reference types, how they are implemented under the hood is different, but end result is the same. You can’t change a let constant
Access control is definitely used in swift to control access to different parts of code. You have open, public, internal, fileprivate and private. You can read about access control in swift here - https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/AccessControl.html
Paolo Scamardella
24,828 PointsPaolo Scamardella
24,828 PointsHi Simon, thank you for the response!