Words are slippery. Like Humpty Dumpty proclaimed in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” Certainly the common usage of the words encapsulation and information hiding seems to follow that logic. Authors rarely distinguish between the two and often directly claim they are the same. Does that make it so? Not for me. Were it simply a matter of words, I wouldn’t write another word on the matter. But there are two distinct concepts behind these terms, concepts engendered separately and best understood separately. Encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with … Continue reading Paul Rogers