Component technology in an embedded system
Master's thesis in computer science
Master's thesis in computer science
This object model does not support making parts of the instance data accessible to code outside the class (such fields are often designated with a public access specifier in object-oriented languages). Such support could easily be added (by exposing a structure containing the public fields, and adding an operation to the Fundamental interface returning a pointer to this structure), but it is probably preferable to eschew exposing parts of the instance data for reasons of encapsulation.
All operations that are part of a dispatch table are per definition publicly accessible. Private operations are easily realized by simply not exposing them in a dispatch table (and declaring them static). (Private operations are always bound to statically, as they may only be accessed by operations that belong to their own class.)
Object-oriented languages often support a protected access specifier that exposes a field or operation only to descendant classes. As this object model does not support implementation inheritance, there is no need for such an access specifier.