Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
A property, in some object-oriented programming languages, is a special sort of class member, intermediate in functionality between a field (or data member) and a method.The syntax for reading and writing of properties is like for fields, but property reads and writes are (usually) translated to 'getter' and 'setter' method calls.
In this example of a simple class representing a student with only the name stored, one can see the variable name is private, i.e. only visible from the Student class, and the "setter" and "getter" are public, namely the "getName()" and "setName(name)" methods.
This is typically accomplished by augmenting an accessor method (or property getter) to check whether a private member, acting as a cache, has already been initialized. If it has, it is returned straight away. If not, a new instance is created, placed into the member variable, and returned to the caller just-in-time for its first use.
Perhaps the most well-known example is C++, an object-oriented extension of the C programming language. Due to the design requirements to add the object-oriented paradigm on to an existing procedural language, message passing in C++ has some unique capabilities and terminologies. For example, in C++ a method is known as a member function.
For example, += and -= are often called plus equal(s) and minus equal(s), instead of the more verbose "assignment by addition" and "assignment by subtraction". The binding of operators in C and C++ is specified (in the corresponding Standards) by a factored language grammar, rather than a precedence table. This creates some subtle conflicts.
In computing, an attribute is a specification that defines a property of an object, element, or file. It may also refer to or set the specific value for a given instance of such. For clarity, attributes should more correctly be considered metadata. An attribute is frequently and generally a property of a property.
This is a legacy of C, where the for statement is basically syntactic sugar for a while statement. The getter and setter of a property may implement separate interfaces. In VB you'd have to define two properties instead: a read-only property implementing one interface, and a write-only property implementing the other interface.
/*Ruby has three member variable types: class, class instance, and instance. */ class Dog # The class variable is defined within the class body with two at-signs # and describes data about all Dogs *and* their derived Dog breeds (if any) @@sniffs = true end mutt = Dog. new mutt. class. sniffs #=> true class Poodle < Dog # The "class instance variable" is defined within the class body with a ...