Why do people write private-field getters returning a non-const reference?

Question

We can all agree on public variables being bad for encapsulation and all that. However, I noticed a lot of code that does this type of stuff:

class foo {
pri         


        

Answer 1

I would strongly discouraged returning a non-const reference to a private variable. Not because it breaks encapsulation, but because it is unnecessary: Why not make the variable public in the first place?

Breaking encapsulation is bad, yes, but that does not mean that every variable should be private. Some variables are meant to be read and modified from the user, so it would make sense to make them public. For example, take std::pair, it has 2 public member variables, first and second. That's not bad practice.

The only time it doesn't make sense is when the variable is not supposed to be written to. That would be bad, as it would actually break encapsulation and make the whole program hard to debug.