Java Conventions: use getters/setters WITHIN the class?

Question

My professor really emphasizes protecting against privacy leaks by always using accessors and mutators to access private instance variables; however, do I have to use the ge

Answer 1

In general, no. If your getter returns something other than the value of the field then you should use the method, but in that rare case your method should have a more descriptive name. For a bad example, if you have:

public void setName(String name)
{
  _name = name;
}

and your getter returned something else, like

public String getName()
{
  return _name.toUpperCase();
}

then yes, you should use the getter. It would be better, though, to have a more descriptive name for that getter:

public String getNameAsUppercase()
{
  return _name.toUpperCase();
}