Am Friday 23 October 2009 01:41:57 schrieb Sid Sacek:
[ Edward Diener wrote: ] Manipulating a reference property would be done purely through accessing the property. Accessing a reference property returns a T & or a T const & depending on whether the property is const or not. In the case where a T & is returned the reference property is read/write if T itself is not const, since you can manipulate T through the reference, whereas in the case where T const & is returned ( or where T & is returns but T is itself const), the reference property is read only.
Who says that's how properties work? That just happens to be your version of the implementation details.
I don't understand what a "reference property" is supposed to be. a property getter can return a reference (if it chooses to do so, not in general, since there may not be an underlying data member), but what is a reference property? whether the value obtained through the getter is stored inside the object itself or only referenced by the object doesn't matter to the interface. the example given for a "reference property": struct D{ C& c; }; is equivalent to struct D{ C c; }; from the perspective of the user of the class interface. so why would there be a difference when the same thing is implemented as a "property"? and what is the difference? to the general discussion, I think there needs to be an agreed upon definition of a property first, before talking about library implementations. I defined a property to be "a property of an object" in general, e.g. the width of a rectangle, with the syntax to obtain that property from the object as an irrelevant detail, as long as it's standardized. that's why I came to the conclusion that c++ already has a syntax for properties. others seem to have the goal to emulate a C# language construct called "property" in C++. a third concern was a simpler definition of default/trivial properties, with whatever syntax to access them.