"Edward Diener" <eddielee@tropicsoft.com> writes:
If you are making designs that would normally have a lot of getters and setters, it suggests that they may have an insufficient level of abstraction. Of course, that isn't neccessarily the case -- but it does seem to be the rule in my code. I personally don't have a need for this facility and I don't think I want a library that would encourage that style.
I don't see what getters and setters have to do with levels of abstraction. Needless to say I see nothing wrong with the style that uses properties, but since you didn't say what bothers you about that style I can't answer for why you don't like it. Care to explain ?
When classes have a lot of getters and setters or, equivalently, exposed properties that are just reflections of underlying data members, they usually represent just a collection of exposed data values rather than a higher level of abstraction. I haven't read through this to see if I agree with any of the points being made, but you can read an article on the subject here: http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-09-2003/jw-0905-toolbox.html? and a pretty comprehensive discussion here: http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/default.asp?cmd=show&ixPost=70526 To the extent to which properties (which I *do* think have a place in good software) are just syntactic sugar for getters/setters, the same arguments apply. You can of course make up your own mind about this stuff ;-) -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com