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 wrote this once. I planned later to go back and replace the field getter with something that returned a stack object to something that could be cast to the original type and assigned to by the original type. This allowed me to go back later and intercept all assignments to put validations in.

Kinda overpowered techinque. None of the other coders on the project could understand it at all. The whole stack got ripped out.