Best to use Private methods or Protected methods?

Question

In a lot of my PHP projects, I end up with classes that have non-public functions that I don\'t intend to extend.

Is it best to declare these as protected, or privat

Answer 1

Personally, I find it proper to make as much private as you possibly can. I just look at each method and ask myself if I want a derived class to be able to call it. Making everything protected leaves open the door to having methods called incorrectly.

I guess it comes down to the questions "Is everything forbidden unless specifically permitted" or "Is everything permitted unless specifically forbiffffden.

One additional factor is that it's easy to make a private method protected in a future release. It's almost impossible to privatize a method once it's made protected, as you never know what other code you invalidate.