Agree about guarding access. But (there's always a butt) with the value range (0-99) and the type of access (read-only in one context; write-only in the other) guarding is not necessary. Just don't tell anyone. Getting people to use the correct general purpose pattern has been extremely difficult. We really do not want to muddy the waters discussing when it is not necessary. (The relevant variables really should be changed to byte (uint8_t) to reflect (document) the limited range.)