Parameter vs. Member variables

Question

I\'ve recently been working with someone else\'s code and I realized that this individual has a very different philosophy regarding private variables and method parameters t

Answer 1

Since object properties are meant to hold state, as stated by the others, my policy is to have all of them private by default unless I have a good reason to expose them.

It's much easier to make them public later on, if you have to, simply by writing a getter method for example (which i also don't have to think about right at the beginning of writing a class). But reeling in a public property later on may require a huge amount of code to be re-written.

I like to keep it flexible while not having to think about this more than needed.