Code style: "hiding" data types (Java)

Question

I'm working on a set of classes to represent musical notes, bars, rhythms and so on. Naturally, I'll have to deal with time signatures that are best represented by a fraction (like 4/4, 3/4 and so on).

I'm wondering what is better style. Having a constructor for a Bar contain a Fraction-object or just two ints as a time signature.

public Bar(Fraction timeSignature) {
    this.timeSignature = timeSignature;
}

or:

public Bar (int num, int den) {
    timeSignature = new Fraction(num, den);
}

I mean… i could have both but which one should I go for in my application? Is there a "better" style?

Thank you for your thoughts!

Answer 1

Personally, I'd go w/ the first approach. If you know you need/want a Fraction object, why have the Bar not just take that? The person invoking the Bar class will need to understand the Fraction either way (to pass you the ints), so it's just cleaner.

Answer 2

I'd use the first one and provide a factory method in the fraction class to be able to call something like:

new Bar(Fraction.of(4, 4));

best of both world ;-)