Differentiating Encapsulation and Information Hiding

13 July 2021 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 6 March 2024Information Hiding and Encapsulation are two software design principles that are closely related. Encapsulation often requires some information hiding, so the two certainly techniques go hand-in-hand. However, in many sources they are considered to be synonymous terms. The confusion between the two concepts is not helped by the fact that there is no singular, precise definition used – instead, you’ll find variance across sources. We can dispel the idea that they are synonymous with a single observation: if encapsulation and information hiding are equivalent terms, then we can argue …

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