Re: FW: C# 3.0 Automatic Properties

<Inline>

Regards

Richard Blewett - DevelopMentor

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Discussion of development on the .NET platform using any managed
> language [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith
> Hill
> Sent: 20 November 2007 21:54
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: [DOTNET-CLR] FW: C# 3.0 Automatic Properties
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Fabian Schmied [mailto:[email protected]]
> > Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2007 1:22 AM
> > Subject: Re: C# 3.0 Automatic Properties
> > Encapsulation is a nice word, but IMO in many, many cases (like
> > utility structs) public readonly fields do the job very well. I've
> yet
> > to hear a convincing reason to prefer properties over public readonly
> > fields when both of them would be applicable.
>
> I have to disagree.  IMO it is a bad idea to expose public fields (even
> readonly) unless you are talking about a true cosmological constant
> like Pi or E.  The reason is that public field values get baked
> (compiled) into your client's code.  Once a client has compiled against
> your type, it will never ask for that public field value again until
> you recompile.  So if you decide to change the value well then all your
> clients will have to recompile.

Hmmm - this is not true. Constant values are baked into the consumer but
fields are not - so this objection is not valid. I agree with the rest of
your objections

And as far as performance is concerned
> most trivial property getters are inlined.  Furthermore, you may decide
> that you need logic in the retrieval of the field's value - oops can't
> do that.  Non-readonly fields are worse since they can never be thread
> safe (unless there is a field sync attribute I don't know about).
>
> BTW for the folks objecting to the compiler syntactic sugar known as
> automatic properties, how is this that different than what the compiler
> does for you when you use the event keyword?
>
> --
> Keith
>
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