> By definition, Public Variables (by virtue of the fact that they hold data required and used by objects OUTSIDE of the objects) break encapsulation!
>
> Regards
> Andy Kramek
> Microsoft MVP (Visual FoxPro)
> Tightline Computers Inc, Akron Ohio, USA

Hmmm... I am yet to see someone declaring PUBLIC memvars inside an object's definition!
Have you seen it, ever?

OTOH, I am not totally against PUBLIC memvars: I do frown on it, but I don't see a capital crime in usage, albeit quite minimal, of PUBLIC memvars. For instance:

I once (around 2000-2001) ran across the problem with frequent call to my UDF determining designated Temp dir location (wrapper around API functions; why API - it's another story): after N-th call, VFP threw me an error message (can't recall what exactly, but something to do with memory - stack, perhaps?); so, instead of calling that GetTempDir() wrapper-around-API function in my program, I added PUBLIC gcTempDir, assigned it only once - with the call to that same function, - replaced all but the first one calls with gcTempDir throughtout... and that "hurricane" of errors was gone!

So, I do not see a crime in using PUBLIC memvars. But what do (and always have) consider as a capital crime, punishable by excommunication from Programming, moral auto da fe and burning at stakes is implicit declaration of memory variables! For such crime I'd... OK, I'd better stop right there.

Regards,

Ilya