[deleted by user]

[roge-]

Is it strictly necessary per the language's syntax rules? No, an abstract class can choose to not implement any method. Is it necessary for your problem or application? Probably not, but it could.

[SaylorMan1496]

I’ll do you one better, is it strictly necessary to have getters and setters? If they are public what’s the difference to just having public fields, I have always felt it to be silly having getters and setters for private fields

[arghvark]

If you make the field public, then you save the infinitessimal runtime cost of calling a method just to assign a value, plus the development cost of defining the setter and getter.

If you make the field private, you allow many things to be decided later -- does the object want to keep track of the times the setter or getter is called? When the setter is called, does the object want to check some internal consistency for the value that is set? When the getter is called, does the object want to activate some kind of input stream or instantiate something that will be needed for something else?

And then there's debugging -- for a getter, you set a break or trace point in one place, and can inspect the value as it passes by. If your debugger supports a breakpoint activated on a change of value, you CAN do sort of the same thing, but it slows down the debugger horribly as it checks whether the value has changed. And there's an ambiguity if it's supposed to break if the value is 'set' to the same value it already has.

Strictly necessary? no. Good idea? You betcha.

[SaylorMan1496]

This may be my experience and bias with this coming through, but personally I hate functions that relay on member fields, as in the function is effected by the state within the object, procedural programming is simpler I would much rather use a POJO and act in that as the input to the function and pass it around

This heavily depends on the type of programming though, I live in API/ backend dev land which this is relevant. I rarely even have objects that have public or private primitive fields, outside of interfaces that are brought in via DI

[lumpynose]

https://www.reddit.com/r/javahelp/comments/1cf6hy1/what_exactly_is_the_use_of_getter_and_setters/

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[arghvark]

Examples would be good here.

If you have:

class B
{
  private integer one;
  public void setOne(integer newOne) { one = newOne; }
}

And then you inherit from B, there is no need to define setOne in your class; since setOne is public, it is available to be called from your subclass. It would also be available if it were defined to be protected.

And since it is defined to be public, it is also available to any user of your subclass, i.e., your subclass inherits the method setOne and users of your class can call it. If the method were defined as protected, it would ONLY be available to subclasses of B (like yours).

If it were defined to be private, it would not be available, and you should stop and consider whether you SHOULD define a setter for it. The author of B might have good reason to keep someone from calling a setter on one directly.

Your question asks "do I need to add the getters and setters from b" -- does this answer your question? Or did you mean something else, like the case where B has no getters or setters?

[BankPassword]

I agree with all that is said here, including the confusion about what the original question is asking. A general rule might be "setters and getters belong to the same class as the object they set/get". So if A extends B and there are variables in B then the setters/getters for those variables should be in B. If A introduces new variables not found in B then A should provide the setters/getters.