I am learning OOP. I have studied much about encapsulation but the more I read the more I became confused.

I understand we hide (by making private) data and expose it to user of class (other developers) as properties or methods. I also understand by encapsulation we hide details.

In an article (http://www.csharp-station.com/Tutorial/CSharp/lesson19) I read:

Abstract from article

When designing an object, you must think about how others could use it. In a best-case scenario any program using the object would be well designed and the code would never change. However, the reality is that programs do change often and in a team environment many people touch the same code at one time or another. Therefore, it is beneficial to consider what could go wrong as well as the pristine image of how the object should be used.

In the case of the BankAccount object, examine the situation where code outside of your object could access a decimal Amount field or a string CustomerName field. At the point of time that the code is written, everything would work well. However, later in the development cycle, you realize that the BankAccount object should keep track of an int CustomerID rather than string CustomerName because you don't want to duplicate relationships between information (or some other valid reason to alter the definition of internal state). Such changes cause a rippling effect in your code because it was built to use the BankAccount class, as originally designed (with CustomerName being a string), and you must now change code that accesses that state throughout your entire application.

The object-oriented principle of Encapsulation helps avoid such problems, allowing you to hide internal state and abstract access to it though type members such as methods, properties, and indexers. Encapsulation helps you reduce coupling between objects and increases the maintainability of your code. 

Question
How will encapsulation help when making changes in code and from its rippling effects.
For a data member, if I change its type from int to float, (even if I am exposing this using property) I will need to change variable type where I am using already using this code.

Kindly guide me how encapsulation will help with such changes.

Thanks for this help and guidance.


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