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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.
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.
In the first example a user is free to use the public name variable however they see fit - in the second however the writer of the class retains control over how the private name variable is read and written by only permitting access to the field via its getName and setName methods.
The properties can be simple access-er functions with a backing field, or implement arbitrary getter and setter functions. A property is read-only if there's no setter. Like with fields, there can be class and instance properties. The underlying methods can be virtual or abstract like any other method. [82]
Friend: C++ supports a mechanism where a function explicitly declared as a friend function of the class may access the members designated as private or protected. [15] Path-based: Java supports restricting access to a member within a Java package, which is the logical path of the file. However, it is a common practice when extending a Java ...
Properties are implemented by way of the @synthesize keyword, which generates getter (and setter, if not read-only) methods according to the property declaration. Alternatively, the getter and setter methods must be implemented explicitly, or the @dynamic keyword can be used to indicate that accessor methods will be provided by other means.
But, unlike C++, Java doesn't create a default copy constructor if you don't write your own. Copy constructors define the actions performed by the compiler when copying class objects. A Copy constructor has one formal parameter that is the type of the class (the parameter may be a reference to an object).