General Definition
In general, encapsulation is one of the 4 fundamentals of OOP (object-oriented programming). Encapsulation is to hide the variables or something inside a class, preventing unauthorized parties to use. So the public methods like getter and setter access it and the other classes call these methods for accessing.
This mechanism is not unique to object-oriented programming. Implementations of abstract data types, e.g. modules, offer a similar form of encapsulation. This similarity stems from the fact that both notions rely on the same mathematical fundament of an existential type.
Read more about this topic: Encapsulation (object-oriented Programming)
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