Why would you declare getters and setters method private? [duplicate]

Question

I saw a code where getters and setters methods are declared private. I am trying to figure out the logic behind it, and I am really having hard time to understand why would you declare them as private? That's exactly opposite of what we are trying to achieve through getters and setters.

Answer 1

I can think of several reasons:

• you want to prevent future public access.

If a different programmer sees your code and wants access to a variable, but there are no setters and getters, he might think you just forgot about them, and add them themselves. However, if you declare them as private, it's a statement of intent, saying I don't want these variables to be changed or accessed from the outside.

• you want to associate setting and getting with other actions

Say you don't want public accessors. But maybe you want a count of how many times a private variable is changed. It's easier to use a setter rather than incrementing the count every time you access that variable.

• you want a central access point

Again, you don't want public access, but during debugging, you might want to put a breakpoint in every place a private member is changed. So instead of setting breakpoints everywhere in the class, you just set one in the accessor.