lisp, CLOS: adding a slot to the lock class - locking

I am trying to add a new slot to the lock class. This is useful because I have a lot of locks in a hierarchy and if I store the parent lock for every lock it becomes easier to detect problems while debugging.
Unfortunately, this apparently can't be done with the ensure-class function. I can add slots to 'process, but not to 'lock, because it is listed as a built-in-class. See my earlier question here for how to do it for 'process:
lisp, CLOS: adding a slot to the process class
Do you know how to solve this problem?
If it is not possible, the only alternative I can think of is storing the hierarchical relation of locks in a hash-table, but since some of the locks are created at runtime and in different processes, I would have to add yet another lock just to access the hashtable that stores metadata on the locks.
This strikes me as terribly inefficient. Do you have a better idea?
edit: for clarification, I am using Clozure Common Lisp.

You can specify the metaclass using the :metaclass class option in a defclass form.
CL-USER> (defclass hierarchical-lock (lock)
((parent :initarg :parent :reader parent))
(:metaclass built-in-class))
#<BUILT-IN-CLASS HIERARCHICAL-LOCK>
However, even though you can do that and get the class, I'm not sure how you would go about instantiating it. Trying to use make-instance fails:
CL-USER> (make-instance 'hierarchical-lock)
; There is no applicable method for the generic function:
; #<STANDARD-GENERIC-FUNCTION MAKE-INSTANCE #x30200002676F>
; when called with arguments:
; (#<BUILT-IN-CLASS HIERARCHICAL-LOCK>)
; [Condition of type SIMPLE-ERROR]
make-lock is implemented in l0-aprims.lisp as
(defun make-lock (&optional name)
"Create and return a lock object, which can be used for synchronization
between threads."
(%make-lock (%make-recursive-lock-ptr) name))
You can keep following the implementation of %make-lock until you get to the low level implementation details, but it's clear that locks are not obtained the same way that typical CLOS instances are.
In addition to Rainer Joswig's suggestion in a comment on this answer that you let the CCL developers know that you would appreciate locks being CLOS objects, you can always use some aggregation and define your own hierarchical-lock that has slot for its primitive lock and a slot for parent. By the magic of generic functions, you can implement methods on the generic functions that work with locks so that your hierarchical-lock behaves like a built in lock. (This presumes that the lock API is defined in terms of generic functions.)

You could use a subclass that has such a slot.
(defclass hierarchical-lock (lock)
((parent :initarg :parent :reader parent)))

Related

Why is objc_duplicateClass marked "Do not call this function yourself"

The documentation for objc_duplicateClass reads simply
Used by Foundation's Key-Value Observing. Do not call this function yourself.
with no elaboration or explanation. I read the source, but didn't see anything in it that that gave me any indication for why you shouldn't call it, except a few theories; except that load and initialize don't get called for classes created by objc_duplicateClass?
It seems like you could produce pretty much the same effect by calling objc_allocateClassPair with no extra bytes for additional ivars, and then immediately registering it. So what's special about objc_duplicateClass? Or, to rephrase the question, if, hypothetically, I wanted to build KVO, or something very similar, on top of the objc runtime, would it be safe to to use objc_duplicateClass?
objc_duplicateClass does pretty much what it says on the tin: it produces a new class which is a copy of the class that you give it. This includes copying the methods that the old class had, all of its metadata bits, and even its metaclass.
You couldn't recreate this behavior with objc_allocateClassPair because objc_allocateClassPair registers a new metaclass for the class you create, among other things like initializing the class — it is meant to create a new class. objc_duplicateClass creates a copy; the "new" class is not initialized any further and does not get a new metaclass because the original one already did.
As for why objc_duplicateClass is documented the way that it is: to discourage its use. objc_duplicateClass has some rare use cases, and will almost never be what you want. If you find a need for it, use it, but keep in mind that there are subtleties to the implementation you may not be aware of.
Even I marked the Q as opinion based, I'd like to try an answer:
A. Such a statement usually marks a function (or whatever) to be obsolete and is planned to be removed in future.
B. Indeed, there is no reason for this function. I do not agree with your statement, that registering a new class with zero extra bytes would do the job. because maybe there are extra bytes and you have to copy all instance var descriptions and methods manually.
However, I had to deal with such situations as KVO in the past. I have never used objc_duplicateClass(), because t is much easier and akin of cleaner to create a subclass and then make the instance a member of that subclass. You can do isa-swizzling for that calling object_setClass(id object, Class cls).
Think of a situation, obviously it is yours, that another technology wants to do something like KVO, too. Duplicating a class using objc_duplicateClass() takes not part on future dynamic changes of the original class. Maybe a method is added to it. A duplication would not add this method, too.
So objc_duplicateClass() is not useful and a bad approach.

Why is it called "open (or closed) recursion?

I found some explanations of open/closed recursion, but I do not understand why the definition contains the word "recursion", or how it compares with dynamic/static dispatching. Among the explanations I found, there are:
Open recursion. Another handy feature offered by most
languages with objects and classes is the ability for one method
body to invoke another method of the same object via a special
variable called self or, in some languages, this. The special
behavior of self is that it is late-bound, allowing a method defined
in one class to invoke another method that is defined later, in
some subclass of the first. [Ralf Hinze]
... or in Wikipedia :
The dispatch semantics of this, namely that method calls on this are dynamically dispatched, is known as open recursion, and means that these methods can be overridden by derived classes or objects. By contrast, direct named recursion or anonymous recursion of a function uses closed recursion, with early binding.
I also read the StackOverflow question: What is open recursion?
But I do not understand why the word "recursion" is used for the definition. Of course, it can lead to interesting (or dangerous) side-effect if one uses "open recursion" by doing... a method recursion call. But the definitions do not take method/function recursive call directly into account (appart the "closed recursion" in the Wikipedia definition, but it sounds strange since "open recursion" does not refer to recursive call).
Do you know why there is the word "recursion" in the definition? Is it because it is based on another computer science definition that I am not aware of? Should simply saying "dynamic dispatch" not be enough?
I tried to start writing an answer here and then ended up writing an entire blog post about it. The TL;DR is:
So, if you compare a real object-oriented language to a simpler language with just structures and functions, the differences are:
All of the methods can see and call each other. The order they are defined doesn’t matter since their definitions are “simultaneous” or mutually recursive.
The base methods have access to the derived receiver object (i.e. this or self in other languages) so they don’t close over just each other. They are open to overridden methods.
Thus: open recursion.

Is it good convention for a class to perform functions on itself?

I've always been taught that if you are doing something to an object, that should be an external thing, so one would Save(Class) rather than having the object save itself: Class.Save().
I've noticed that in the .Net libraries, it is common to have a class modify itself as with String.Format() or sort itself as with List.Sort().
My question is, in strict OOP is it appropriate to have a class which performs functions on itself when called to do so, or should such functions be external and called on an object of the class' type?
Great question. I have just recently reflected on a very similar issue and was eventually going to ask much the same thing here on SO.
In OOP textbooks, you sometimes see examples such as Dog.Bark(), or Person.SayHello(). I have come to the conclusion that those are bad examples. When you call those methods, you make a dog bark, or a person say hello. However, in the real world, you couldn't do this; a dog decides himself when it's going to bark. A person decides itself when it will say hello to someone. Therefore, these methods would more appropriately be modelled as events (where supported by the programming language).
You would e.g. have a function Attack(Dog), PlayWith(Dog), or Greet(Person) which would trigger the appropriate events.
Attack(dog) // triggers the Dog.Bark event
Greet(johnDoe) // triggers the Person.SaysHello event
As soon as you have more than one parameter, it won't be so easy deciding how to best write the code. Let's say I want to store a new item, say an integer, into a collection. There's many ways to formulate this; for example:
StoreInto(1, collection) // the "classic" procedural approach
1.StoreInto(collection) // possible in .NET with extension methods
Store(1).Into(collection) // possible by using state-keeping temporary objects
According to the thinking laid out above, the last variant would be the preferred one, because it doesn't force an object (the 1) to do something to itself. However, if you follow that programming style, it will soon become clear that this fluent interface-like code is quite verbose, and while it's easy to read, it can be tiring to write or even hard to remember the exact syntax.
P.S.: Concerning global functions: In the case of .NET (which you mentioned in your question), you don't have much choice, since the .NET languages do not provide for global functions. I think these would be technically possible with the CLI, but the languages disallow that feature. F# has global functions, but they can only be used from C# or VB.NET when they are packed into a module. I believe Java also doesn't have global functions.
I have come across scenarios where this lack is a pity (e.g. with fluent interface implementations). But generally, we're probably better off without global functions, as some developers might always fall back into old habits, and leave a procedural codebase for an OOP developer to maintain. Yikes.
Btw., in VB.NET, however, you can mimick global functions by using modules. Example:
Globals.vb:
Module Globals
Public Sub Save(ByVal obj As SomeClass)
...
End Sub
End Module
Demo.vb:
Imports Globals
...
Dim obj As SomeClass = ...
Save(obj)
I guess the answer is "It Depends"... for Persistence of an object I would side with having that behavior defined within a separate repository object. So with your Save() example I might have this:
repository.Save(class)
However with an Airplane object you may want the class to know how to fly with a method like so:
airplane.Fly()
This is one of the examples I've seen from Fowler about an aenemic data model. I don't think in this case you would want to have a separate service like this:
new airplaneService().Fly(airplane)
With static methods and extension methods it makes a ton of sense like in your List.Sort() example. So it depends on your usage pattens. You wouldn't want to have to new up an instance of a ListSorter class just to be able to sort a list like this:
new listSorter().Sort(list)
In strict OOP (Smalltalk or Ruby), all methods belong to an instance object or a class object. In "real" OOP (like C++ or C#), you will have static methods that essentially stand completely on their own.
Going back to strict OOP, I'm more familiar with Ruby, and Ruby has several "pairs" of methods that either return a modified copy or return the object in place -- a method ending with a ! indicates that the message modifies its receiver. For instance:
>> s = 'hello'
=> "hello"
>> s.reverse
=> "olleh"
>> s
=> "hello"
>> s.reverse!
=> "olleh"
>> s
=> "olleh"
The key is to find some middle ground between pure OOP and pure procedural that works for what you need to do. A Class should do only one thing (and do it well). Most of the time, that won't include saving itself to disk, but that doesn't mean Class shouldn't know how to serialize itself to a stream, for instance.
I'm not sure what distinction you seem to be drawing when you say "doing something to an object". In many if not most cases, the class itself is the best place to define its operations, as under "strict OOP" it is the only code that has access to internal state on which those operations depend (information hiding, encapsulation, ...).
That said, if you have an operation which applies to several otherwise unrelated types, then it might make sense for each type to expose an interface which lets the operation do most of the work in a more or less standard way. To tie it in to your example, several classes might implement an interface ISaveable which exposes a Save method on each. Individual Save methods take advantage of their access to internal class state, but given a collection of ISaveable instances, some external code could define an operation for saving them to a custom store of some kind without having to know the messy details.
It depends on what information is needed to do the work. If the work is unrelated to the class (mostly equivalently, can be made to work on virtually any class with a common interface), for example, std::sort, then make it a free function. If it must know the internals, make it a member function.
Edit: Another important consideration is performance. In-place sorting, for example, can be miles faster than returning a new, sorted, copy. This is why quicksort is faster than merge sort in the vast majority of cases, even though merge sort is theoretically faster, which is because quicksort can be performed in-place, whereas I've never heard of an in-place merge-sort. Just because it's technically possible to perform an operation within the class's public interface, doesn't mean that you actually should.

Object-oriented programming & transactions

A little intro:
Class contains fields and methods (let me skip properties this time).
Fields represent a state of the class.
Methods describe behavior of the class.
In a well-designed class, a method won't change the class's state if it throws an exception, right? (In other words, whatever happens, class's state shouldn't be corrupted)
Question:
Is there a framework, a design pattern, best practice or a programming language to call a sequence of methods in a transactional style, so that either class's state don't get changed (in case of exception), or everything succeeds?
E.g.:
// the class foo is now in the state S1
foo.MoveToState2();
// it is now (supposed to be) in the state S2
foo.MoveToFinalState();
// it is now (supposed to be) in the state, namely, S3
Surely, an exception might occur both in MoveToState2() and MoveToFinalState(). But from this block of code I want the class foo to be either in the state S1 or S3.
This is a simple scenario with a single class involved, no if's, no while's, no side effects, but I hope the idea is clear.
Take a look at the Memento pattern
The memento pattern is a software design pattern that provides the ability to restore an object to its previous state (undo via rollback).
Not the most efficient method, but you could have an object that represents your transactional data. When you start a transaction, make a copy of the data and perform all operations on that. When the transaction ends successfully, move the copy to your real data - this can be done using pointers, so need not be too inefficient.
Functional programming is a paradigm that seems to fit well to transactional computations. Since no side-effects are allowed without explicit declaration, you have full control of all data flow.
Therefore software transactional memory can be expressed easily in functional terms - See STM for F#
The key idea is the concept of monads. A monad can be used to model an arbitrary computation through two primitives: Return to return a value and Bind to sequence two computations. Using these two, you can model a transactional monad that controls and saves all state in form of continuations.
One could try to model these in an object-oriented way through a State+Memento pattern, but generally, transactions in imperative languages (like the common OO-ones) are much more difficult to implement since you can perform arbitrary side-effects. But of course you can think of an object defining a transaction scope, that saves, validates and restores data as needed, given they expose a suitable interface for this (the patterns I mentioned above).
The simplest and most reliable "pattern" to use here is an immutable data structure.
Instead of writing:
foo.MoveToState2();
foo.MoveToFinalState();
You write:
MyFoo foo2 = foo.MoveToState2();
MyFoo finalFoo = foo2.MoveToFinalState();
And implement the methods accordingly - that is, MoveToState2 does not actually change anything about MyFoo, it creates a new MyFoo that is in state 2. Similarly with the final state.
This is how the string classes in most OO languages work. Many OO languages are also starting to implement (or have already implemented) immutable collections. Once you have the building blocks, it's fairly straightforward to create an entire immutable "entity".
This would be pretty ugly to implement everywhere, but just saving the state locally, then restoring it in the case of an exception would work in simple scenarios. You'd have to catch and rethrow the exception, which may lose some context in some languages. It might be better to wrap it if possible to retain the context.
try {
save state in local variables
move to new state
} catch (innerException) {
restore state from local variables
throw new exception( innerException )
}
When using object copy approach, you have to watch out that the statements to be rolled-back are only affecting the object's or data itself (and aggregates).
But things are getting really difficult if the side-effects of the statements are "more external". For example I/O operations, network calls. You always have to analyze the overall state-changes of your statements.
It gets also really tricky if you touch static data (or evil mutable singletons). Reverting this data isolated is difficult, because other threads could have modified them in between (you could face lost updates).
Reverting/rollback to the past is often not so trivial ;)
I would also consider the saga pattern, you could pass a copy of the objects current state into MoveToState2 and if it throws an exception you could catch that internally and use the copy of the original state to rollback. You would have to do the same with MoveToState3 too. If however the server crashed during a rollback you might still get corrupted state, that's why databases are so good.
Transactional memory fits here the best.
An option could be a transactional storage. Sample implementation you can find here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dotnet/Transactional_Repository.aspx
Memento pattern
Also let me describe a possible pattern on how to implement such behavior:
Define a base class TransactionalEntity. This class contains dictionary of properties.
All your transactional classes inherit from the TransactionalEntity and should operate over some sort of Dependency Properties/Fields, i.e. properties(getters/setters) which store it's values not in local class fields, but in dictionary, which is stored in the base class.
Then you define TransactionContext class. TransactionContext class internally contains a set of dictionaries (one dictionary for each entity that participates in the transaction) and when a transactional entity participates in transaction, it writes all data to the dictionary in the transaction context. Then all you need is basically four methods:
TransactionContext.StartTransaction();
TransactionalEntity.JoinTransaction(TransactionContext context); //if your language/framework supports Thread Static fields, then you do not need this method
TransactionContext.CommitTransaction();
TransactionContext.RollbackTransaction();
To sum up, you need to store state in base class TransactionalEntity and during transaction TransactionalEntity will cooperate with TransactionContext.
I hope, I've explained it well enough.
I think a Command Pattern could be well suited to this problem.
Linky.
I was astonished that no one suggested explicitly the simplest pattern to use .. the State Pattern
In this way you can also eliminate that 'finalState' method and just use 'handle()'.
How do you know which final state is?
The memento pattern is best used with the Command pattern, and usually applies to GUI operations to implement the undo/redo feature.
Fields represent a state of the class
Fields represents the state of the instanced object. You use many times wrong definitions of the OOP terms. Review and correct.

Is a function an example of encapsulation?

By putting functionality into a function, does that alone constitute an example of encapsulation or do you need to use objects to have encapsulation?
I'm trying to understand the concept of encapsulation. What I thought was if I go from something like this:
n = n + 1
which is executed out in the wild as part of a big body of code and then I take that, and put it in a function such as this one, then I have encapsulated that addition logic in a method:
addOne(n)
n = n + 1
return n
Or is it more the case that it is only encapsulation if I am hiding the details of addOne from the outside world - like if it is an object method and I use an access modifier of private/protected?
I will be the first to disagree with what seems to be the answer trend. Yes, a function encapsulates some amount of implementation. You don't need an object (which I think you use to mean a class).
See Meyers too.
Perhaps you are confusing abstraction with encapsulation, which is understood in the broader context of object orientation.
Encapsulation properly includes all three of the following:
Abstraction
Implementation Hiding
Division of Responsibility
Abstraction is only one component of encapsulation. In your example you have abstracted the adding functionality from the main body of code in which it once resided. You do this by identifying some commonality in the code - recognizing a concept (addition) over a specific case (adding the number one to the variable n). Because of this ability, abstraction makes an encapsulated component - a method or an object - reusable.
Equally important to the notion of encapsulation is the idea of implementation hiding. This is why encapsulation is discussed in the arena of object orientation. Implementation hiding protects an object from its users and vice versa. In OO, you do this by presenting an interface of public methods to the users of your object, while the implementation of the object takes place inside private methods.
This serves two benefits. First, by limiting access to your object, you avoid a situation where users of the object can leave the object in an invalid state. Second, from the user's perspective, when they use your object they are only loosely coupled to it - if you change your implementation later on, they are not impacted.
Finally, division of responsility - in the broader context of an OO design - is something that must be considered to address encapsulation properly. It's no use encapsulating a random collection of functions - responsibility needs to be cleanly and logically defined so that there is as little overlap or ambiguity as possible. For example, if we have a Toilet object we will want to wall off its domain of responsibilities from our Kitchen object.
In a limited sense, though, you are correct that a function, let's say, 'modularizes' some functionality by abstracting it. But, as I've said, 'encapsulation' as a term is understood in the broader context of object orientation to apply to a form of modularization that meets the three criteria listed above.
Sure it is.
For example, a method that operates only on its parameters would be considered "better encapsulated" than a method that operates on global static data.
Encapsulation has been around long before OOP :)
A method is no more an example of encapsulation than a car is an example of good driving. Encapsulation isn't about the synax, it is a logical design issue. Both objects and methods can exhibit good and bad encapsulation.
The simplest way to think about it is whether the code hides/abstracts the details from other parts of the code that don't have a need to know/care about the implementation.
Going back to the car example:
Automatic transmission offers good encapsulation: As a driver you care about forward/back and speed.
Manual Transmission is bad encapsulation: From the driver's perspective the specific gear required for low/high speeds is generally irrelevant to the intent of the driver.
No, objects aren't required for encapsulation. In the very broadest sense, "encapsulation" just means "hiding the details from view" and in that regard a method is encapsulating its implementation details.
That doesn't really mean you can go out and say your code is well-designed just because you divided it up into methods, though. A program consisting of 500 public methods isn't much better than that same program implemented in one 1000-line method.
In building a program, regardless of whether you're using object oriented techniques or not, you need to think about encapsulation at many different places: hiding the implementation details of a method, hiding data from code that doesn't need to know about it, simplifying interfaces to modules, etc.
Update: To answer your updated question, both "putting code in a method" and "using an access modifier" are different ways of encapsulating logic, but each one acts at a different level.
Putting code in a method hides the individual lines of code that make up that method so that callers don't need to care about what those lines are; they only worry about the signature of the method.
Flagging a method on a class as (say) "private" hides that method so that a consumer of the class doesn't need to worry about it; they only worry about the public methods (or properties) of your class.
The abstract concept of encapsulation means that you hide implementation details. Object-orientation is but one example of the use of ecnapsulation. Another example is the language called module-2 that uses (or used) implementation modules and definition modules. The definition modules hid the actual implementation and therefore provided encapsulation.
Encapsulation is used when you can consider something a black box. Objects are a black box. You know the methods they provide, but not how they are implemented.
[EDIT]
As for the example in the updated question: it depends on how narrow or broad you define encapsulation. Your AddOne example does not hide anything I believe. It would be information hiding/encapsulation if your variable would be an array index and you would call your method moveNext and maybe have another function setValue and getValue. This would allow people (together maybe with some other functions) to navigate your structure and setting and getting variables with them being aware of you using an array. If you programming language would support other or richer concepts you could change the implementation of moveNext, setValue and getValue with changing the meaning and the interface. To me that is encapsulation.
It's a component-level thing
Check this out:
In computer science, Encapsulation is the hiding of the internal mechanisms and data structures of a software component behind a defined interface, in such a way that users of the component (other pieces of software) only need to know what the component does, and cannot make themselves dependent on the details of how it does it. The purpose is to achieve potential for change: the internal mechanisms of the component can be improved without impact on other components, or the component can be replaced with a different one that supports the same public interface.
(I don't quite understand your question, let me know if that link doesn't cover your doubts)
Let's simplify this somewhat with an analogy: you turn the key of your car and it starts up. You know that there's more to it than just the key, but you don't have to know what is going on in there. To you, key turn = motor start. The interface of the key (that is, e.g., the function call) hides the implementation of the starter motor spinning the engine, etc... (the implementation). That's encapsulation. You're spared from having to know what's going on under the hood, and you're happy for it.
If you created an artificial hand, say, to turn the key for you, that's not encapsulation. You're turning the key with additional middleman cruft without hiding anything. That's what your example reminds me of - it's not encapsulating implementation details, even though both are accomplished through function calls. In this example, anyone picking up your code will not thank you for it. They will, in fact, be more likely to club you with your artificial hand.
Any method you can think of to hide information (classes, functions, dynamic libraries, macros) can be used for encapsulation.
Encapsulation is a process in which attributes(data member) and behavior(member function) of a objects in combined together as a single entity refer as class.
The Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing - written by the International Organisation for Standardization - defines the following concepts:
Entity: Any concrete or abstract thing of interest.
Object: A model of an entity. An object is characterised by its behaviour and, dually, by its state.
Behaviour (of an object): A collection of actions with a set of constraints on when they may occur.
Interface: An abstraction of the behaviour of an object that consists of a subset of the interactions of that object together with a set of constraints on when they may occur.
Encapsulation: the property that the information contained in an object is accessible only through interactions at the interfaces supported by the object.
These, you will appreciate, are quite broad. Let us see, however, whether putting functionality within a function can logically be considered to constitute towards encapsulation in these terms.
Firstly, a function is clearly a model of a, 'Thing of interest,' in that it represents an algorithm you (presumably) desire executed and that algorithm pertains to some problem you are trying to solve (and thus is a model of it).
Does a function have behaviour? It certainly does: it contains a collection of actions (which could be any number of executable statements) that are executed under the constraint that the function must be called from somewhere before it can execute. A function may not spontaneously be called at any time, without causal factor. Sounds like legalese? You betcha. But let's plough on, nonetheless.
Does a function have an interface? It certainly does: it has a name and a collection of formal parameters, which in turn map to the executable statements contained in the function in that, once a function is called, the name and parameter list are understood to uniquely identify the collection of executable statements to be run without the calling party's specifying those actual statements.
Does a function have the property that the information contained in the function is accessible only through interactions at the interfaces supported by the object? Hmm, well, it can.
As some information is accessible via its interface, some information must be hidden and inaccessible within the function. (The property such information exhibits is called information hiding, which Parnas defined by arguing that modules should be designed to hide both difficult decisions and decisions that are likely to change.) So what information is hidden within a function?
To see this, we should first consider scale. It's easy to claim that, for example, Java classes can be encapsulated within a package: some of the classes will be public (and hence be the package's interface) and some will be package-private (and hence information-hidden within the package). In encapsulation theory, the classes form nodes and the packages form encapsulated regions, with the entirety forming an encapsulated graph; the graph of classes and packages is called the third graph.
It's also easy to claim that functions (or methods) themselves are encapsulated within classes. Again, some functions will be public (and hence be part of the class's interface) and some will be private (and hence information-hidden within the class). The graph of functions and classes is called the second graph.
Now we come to functions. If functions are to be a means of encapsulation themselves they they should contain some information public to other functions and some information that's information-hidden within the function. What could this information be?
One candidate is given to us by McCabe. In his landmark paper on cyclomatic complexity, Thomas McCabe describes source code where, 'Each node in the graph corresponds to a block of code in the program where the flow is sequential and the arcs correspond to branches taken in the program.'
Let us take the McCabian block of sequential execution as the unit of information that may be encapsulated within a function. As the first block within the function is always the first and only guaranteed block to be executed, we can consider the first block to be public, in that it may be called by other functions. All the other blocks within the function, however, cannot be called by other functions (except in languages that allow jumping into functions mid-flow) and so these blocks may be considered information-hidden within the function.
Taking these (perhaps slightly tenuous) definitions, then we may say yes: putting functionality within a function does constitute to encapsulation. The encapsulation of blocks within functions is the first graph.
There is a caveate, however. Would you consider a package whose every class was public to be encapsulated? According to the definitions above, it does pass the test, as you can say that the interface to the package (i.e., all the public classes) do indeed offer a subset of the package's behaviour to other packages. But the subset in this case is the entire package's behaviour, as no classes are information-hidden. So despite regorously satisfying the above definitions, we feel that it does not satisfy the spirit of the definitions, as surely something must be information-hidden for true encapsulation to be claimed.
The same is true for the exampe you give. We can certainly consider n = n + 1 to be a single McCabian block, as it (and the return statement) are a single, sequential flow of executions. But the function into which you put this thus contains only one block, and that block is the only public block of the function, and therefore there are no information-hidden blocks within your proposed function. So it may satisfy the definition of encapsulation, but I would say that it does not satisfy the spirit.
All this, of course, is academic unless you can prove a benefit such encapsulation.
There are two forces that motivate encapsulation: the semantic and the logical.
Semantic encapsulation merely means encapsulation based on the meaning of the nodes (to use the general term) encapsulated. So if I tell you that I have two packages, one called, 'animal,' and one called 'mineral,' and then give you three classes Dog, Cat and Goat and ask into which packages these classes should be encapsulated, then, given no other information, you would be perfectly right to claim that the semantics of the system would suggest that the three classes be encapsulated within the, 'animal,' package, rather than the, 'mineral.'
The other motivation for encapsulation, however, is logic.
The configuration of a system is the precise and exhaustive identification of each node of the system and the encapsulated region in which it resides; a particular configuration of a Java system is - at the third graph - to identify all the classes of the system and specify the package in which each class resides.
To logically encapsulate a system means to identify some mathematical property of the system that depends on its configuration and then to configure that system so that the property is mathematically minimised.
Encapsulation theory proposes that all encapsulated graphs express a maximum potential number of edges (MPE). In a Java system of classes and packages, for example, the MPE is the maximum potential number of source code dependencies that can exist between all the classes of that system. Two classes within the same package cannot be information-hidden from one another and so both may potentially form depdencies on one another. Two package-private classes in separate packages, however, may not form dependencies on one another.
Encapsulation theory tells us how many packages we should have for a given number of classes so that the MPE is minimised. This can be useful because the weak form of the Principle of Burden states that the maximum potential burden of transforming a collection of entities is a function of the maximum potential number of entities transformed - in other words, the more potential source code dependencies you have between your classes, the greater the potential cost of doing any particular update. Minimising the MPE thus minimises the maximum potential cost of updates.
Given n classes and a requirement of p public classes per package, encapsulation theory shows that the number of packages, r, we should have to minimise the MPE is given by the equation: r = sqrt(n/p).
This also applies to the number of functions you should have, given the total number, n, of McCabian blocks in your system. Functions always have just one public block, as we mentioned above, and so the equation for the number of functions, r, to have in your system simplifies to: r = sqrt(n).
Admittedly, few considered the total number of blocks in their system when practicing encapsulation, but it's readily done at the class/package level. And besides, minimising MPE is almost entirely entuitive: it's done by minimising the number of public classes and trying to uniformly distribute classes over packages (or at least avoid have most packages with, say, 30 classes, and one monster pacakge with 500 classes, in which case the internal MPE of the latter can easily overwhelm the MPE of all the others).
Encapsulation thus involves striking a balance between the semantic and the logical.
All great fun.
in strict object-oriented terminology, one might be tempted to say no, a "mere" function is not sufficiently powerful to be called encapsulation...but in the real world the obvious answer is "yes, a function encapsulates some code".
for the OO purists who bristle at this blasphemy, consider a static anonymous class with no state and a single method; if the AddOne() function is not encapsulation, then neither is this class!
and just to be pedantic, encapsulation is a form of abstraction, not vice-versa. ;-)
It's not normally very meaningful to speak of encapsulation without reference to properties rather than solely methods -- you can put access controls on methods, certainly, but it's difficult to see how that's going to be other than nonsensical without any data scoped to the encapsulated method. Probably you could make some argument validating it, but I suspect it would be tortuous.
So no, you're most likely not using encapsulation just because you put a method in a class rather than having it as a global function.