How can I protect derived classes from breaking when I change the internal parts of the base class?
A class has two distinct interfaces for two distinct sets of clients: • It has a public interface that serves unrelated classes • It has a protected interface that serves derived classes Unless you expect all your derived classes to be built by your own team, you should declare your base class’s data members as private and use protected inline access functions by which derived classes will access the private data in the base class. This way the private data declarations can change, but the derived class’s code won’t break (unless you change the protected access functions).
