I had an interview today. I had a question from OOP, about the difference between Encapsulation & Abstraction?
I replied to my knowledge that Encapsulation is basically binding data members & member functions into a single unit called Class. Whereas Abstraction is basically to hide implementation complexity & provide ease of access to the users. I thought she would be okay with my answer. But she queried if the purpose of both is to hide information then what the actual difference between these two is? I could not give any answer to her.
Before asking this question, I read other threads on StackOverFlow about the difference between these two OOPs concepts. But I am not finding myself in a position to convince the interviewer.
Can anyone please justify it with the simplest example?
Encapsulation hides variables or some implementation that may be changed so often in a class to prevent outsiders access it directly. They must access it via getter and setter methods.
Abstraction is used to hide something too, but in a higher degree (class, interface). Clients who use an abstract class (or interface) do not care about what it was, they just need to know what it can do.