Past exam of the year 1 of the computer science course of the University of Oxford / 2021 / Imperative programming / 6 / b / Solution

Protected access makes size available to subclasses implementing the set operations, while preventing ordinary outside clients from assigning arbitrary values to it. The implementations need to update the count when membership changes; clients should affect membership only through the public operations. A publicly writable count could make an emptiness query disagree with the stored elements.

Protection supports encapsulation but does not prove the representation invariant. Subclasses can still update the field incorrectly and must maintain its relationship to the actual set cardinality. In particular, subclass code does not obtain unrestricted access to the protected field of every unrelated set software object.