Private members in CoffeeScript?

Question

Does somebody know how to make private, non-static members in CoffeeScript? Currently I\'m doing this, which just uses a public variable starting with an underscore to clari

Answer 1

There is one problem with Vitaly's answer and that is you cannot define variables that you want to be unique to the scope, if you made a private name that way and then changed it, the name value would change for every single instance of the class, so there is one way we can solve that problem

# create a function that will pretend to be our class 
MyClass = ->

    # this has created a new scope 
    # define our private varibles
    names = ['joe', 'jerry']

    # the names array will be different for every single instance of the class
    # so that solves our problem

    # define our REAL class
    class InnerMyClass 

        # test function 
        getNames: ->
            return names;

    # return new instance of our class 
    new InnerMyClass

It's not impossible to access the the names array from outside unless you use getNames

Test this out

test = new MyClass;

tempNames = test.getNames()

tempNames # is ['joe', 'jerry']

# add a new value 
tempNames.push 'john'

# now get the names again 
newNames = test.getNames();

# the value of newNames is now 
['joe', 'jerry', 'john']

# now to check a new instance has a new clean names array 
newInstance = new MyClass
newInstance.getNames() # === ['joe', 'jerry']


# test should not be affected
test.getNames() # === ['joe', 'jerry', 'john']

Compiled Javascript

var MyClass;

MyClass = function() {
  var names;
  names = ['joe', 'jerry'];
  MyClass = (function() {

    MyClass.name = 'MyClass';

    function MyClass() {}

    MyClass.prototype.getNames = function() {
      return names;
    };

    return MyClass;

  })();
  return new MyClass;
};