Imperfect C++ Practical Solutions for Real-Life Programming

Chapter 35. Properties

Member variables (also known as fields) are data that are part of an object or, in the case of static member variables, belong to a class. Methods are functions that belong to object instances or, in the case of static methods, to a class. Several modern languages (C#, D, Delphi) support the concept of a property. Though using a property is syntactically the same as accessing member variables, properties are different to C++ member variables in that using them may actually involve a function call. For example, property definitions might look like^[1] the Date class shown in Listing 35.1.

Example 35.1. 

 class Date { public: enum WeekDay { Sunday, Monday, ... }; public: property WeekDay get_DayOfWeek() const; property int get_DayOfMonth() ...