Consider a Rational class designed to represent rational numbers as a pair of ints, along with methods reduce (to reduce the rational to simplest form), gcd (to find the greatest common divisor of two ints), as well as methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Why should the reduce and gcd methods be declared to be private?
A) because they will never be used
B) because they will only be called from methods inside Rational
C) because they will only be called from the constructor of Rational
D) because they do not use any of the Rational instance data
E) This is incorrect; they should be declared as public

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The reduce and gcd methods should be declared as private because they are implementation details of the Rational class and should not be accessible or used outside of the class. They should only be called internally by the methods of the Rational class that perform arithmetic operations using the rational numbers. This encapsulation helps to ensure that the class functions properly and that instances of Rational cannot be manipulated in unexpected ways by code outside of the class.

Consider a Rational Class Designed to Represent Rational Numbers as a Pair