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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.
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.
The C# language supports class properties, which provide a means to define get and set operations (getters and setters) for a member variable. The syntax to access or modify the property is the same as accessing any other class member variable, but the actual implementation for doing so can be defined as either a simple read/write access or as ...
In languages that support access specifiers, the interface of a class is considered to be the set of public members of the class, including both methods and attributes (via implicit getter and setter methods); any private members or internal data structures are not intended to be depended on by external code and thus are not part of the interface.
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.
Although the code will vary from one class to another, it is sufficiently stereotypical in structure that it would be better generated automatically than written by hand. For example, in the following Java class representing a pet, almost all the code is boilerplate except for the declarations of Pet, name, and owner:
For example, if a bank-account class provides a getBalance() accessor method to retrieve the current balance (rather than directly accessing the balance data fields), then later revisions of the same code can implement a more complex mechanism for balance retrieval (e.g., a database fetch), without the dependent code needing to be changed. The ...
Cascading can be implemented in terms of chaining by having the methods return the target object (receiver, this, self).However, this requires that the method be implemented this way already – or the original object be wrapped in another object that does this – and that the method not return some other, potentially useful value (or nothing if that would be more appropriate, as in setters).