Nothing in OOP is obvious

Is nothing in OOP obvious to the neophyte?

Here is comment from a class named Observable declared as follows :


   public abstract shared Observable


The documentation for the class contains the following method comment  :

public add-observer

Add an observer to this object's list of observers to be notified. Typically this is only called from the Observer's observe method.


For this to make sense to a neophyte, wouldn't we need TWO variants of PUBLIC, e.g.,

• MY-PUBLIC-FACE
• YOUR-PUBLIC-VIEW-OF-ME

corresponding to

• obj-public (intended for me to call against myself)
• consumers-public (available as your message sent to me)

??

BTW, that add-observer method is declared as follows :

public  
{Observable.add-observer
    o:Observer,
    error-if-present?:bool = false
}:void


Is the issue the method name ?  Should it be 

   all-ya-all-add-observer-to-me

??

Consider :

   receive-observer

But what in a name prevents a hack ?  One idea : object procedures and functions versus messages.  In such a language, an object never sends itself a message.  If you have a local copy of an object, you can use its public procedures and functions.  If you have a pointer to an object - an object reference - you send only messages.

And what did the documenting author mean by "typically" ?

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