Summary
Part of the problem of not specifying what an object depends on, is that its dependencies can violate its invariants. This results in a program that Brian Shearing calls the "Calls-Out-The-Back" problem.

The following was lifted from the notes for Peter Grogono's keynote presentation at CUSEC 2006. This extends the initial thoughs presented on my earlier blog post The Backside of an Interface.

Consider the following class Foo.

class Foo
{
  private int x = 0
  private int y = 0
  invariant y = 2× x
  public void f()
  {
    x += 1
    y += 2
  }
  public void g()
  {
    x *= 3
    y *= 3
  }
}

It has an invariant — you all know what an invariant is, of cousre — anyway, this invariant says that y is always twice x. The initial values, x = y = 0, respect the invariant. Both functions, f and g, maintain the invariant. Everything’s fine.

Now let’s give it a variable b and call b’s function h. Note that this does not change the (so- called) interface of Foo, because the new variable is private and the call is an implementation secret of Foo.f .

class Foo
{
  private int x = 0
  private int y = 0
  private Bar b
  invariant y = 2 * x

  public void f()
  {
    x += 1
    b.h()
    y += 2
  }
  public void g()
  {
    x *= 3
    y *= 3
  }
}

Now look at class Bar. It’s method h calls Foo’s function g.

class Bar
{
  private Foo f
  public void h()
  {
    f.g();
  }
}

This has unexpected consequences for Foo. Think of the interface as being the top of the box. The damage is done by the thread of control coming out of the bottom of the box — nothing to do with the “interface”.Here is the sequence of assignments that take place and the resulting values:

x = 0 0
y = 0 0
x += 1 1
x *= 3 3
y *= 3 0
y += 2 2

The invariant now says 2 = 2 ×3. Oops! The call b.h() in class Foo is an important part of its behaviour — and therefore must be considered as part of its interface. Note how Foo has lost control of its “private” internals. As a technical aside, note also that if Foo was a monitor allowing only one method to be executed at a time, this program would deadlock.

I’ve presented this as an example of the meaning of interface. But you should note that it is really quite a serious problem: objects have no control over their private data. This is a consequence of the fact that objects can invoke functions in other objects.

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About the Blogger

Christopher Diggins is a software developer and freelance writer. Christopher loves programming, but is eternally frustrated by the shortcomings of modern programming languages. As would any reasonable person in his shoes, he decided to quit his day job to write his own ( www.heron-language.com ). Christopher is the co-author of the C++ Cookbook from O'Reilly. Christopher can be reached through his home page at www.cdiggins.com.