This chapter is from the book
5.4 Object-Private Fields
In Scala (as well as in Java or C++), a method can access the private fields of all objects of its class. For example,
class Counter { private var value = 0 def increment() { value += 1 }
def isLess(other : Counter) = value < other.value // Can access private field of other object }
Accessing other.value is legal because other is also a Counter object.
Scala allows an even more severe access restriction with the private[this] qualifier:
private[this] var value = 0 // Accessing someObject.value is not allowed
Now, the methods of the Counter class can only access the value field of the current object, not of other objects of type Counter. This access is sometimes called object-private, and it is common in some OO languages such as SmallTalk.
With a class-private field, Scala generates private getter and setter methods. However, for an object-private field, no getters and setters are generated at all.