For Javabeans you can look at http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/ . For dotnet components you can look at MSDN online at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx and search for 'property'.
Cheers, I will look into these later on.
Properties in Java and dotnet are not exposed member variables. Rather they are member functions which get and/or set values. The advantage of a property is that one can use member data access notation, ie. avalue = someObject.someMember for getters and someObject.someMember = avalue for setters, and one is internally calling a member function to get or set some value. The value itself does not even have to be a data member but can be retreived or assigned on the fly. For many C++ programmers properties are merely syntactic sugar for calling a getSomeValue and/or setSomeValue member function, which in essence it is, but it regularizes the syntax in a consistent way.
You're absolutely right. I will definitely read up on properties as they are a similar construct, thanks for the input. What I want to achieve is different though. I am not interested in adding syntactic sugar. I also think properties doesn't communicate clearly what they do. A name like observable_value<bool> is much clearer. Best Regards, Johan