John, Erik--

I've following this thread all day, and I appreciate the lucid, substantive discussion.

A couple of thoughts:

"Coupling" one class to another by letting it refer by name to another class's property makes sense (I've found) in tightly related classes. So, it's a matter of degree and surely the literature should (if it doesn't) deal with degree of relationship. (I don't know the *right* words here.)

Erik's comment that using _assign and _access to intercept and route a calculation, say, to the correct property assignments _by_the_owning_object is a very nice point. It does in fact seem to yield exactly the same encapsulation as a method.

From out here in the trenches, thanks for the *real life* discussion guys.

>>The property 'accessed' using access/assign doesn't even have to be the property that actually stores the value!

..snip

>This exact method was demostrated to me in VB. And it's a good one.