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An essential technique in software design is to decompose a system into distinct, manageable abstractions. However, there is little value in decomposing a piece of software into several parts if each part depends on all the other parts in a tangled mess of interactions. For a decomposition to be useful, the resulting abstractions have to be well isolated from each other. For good design, an idea that should be inseparable from that of software abstraction is encapsulation.