Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By : Gaston C. Hillar
Book Image

Learning Object-Oriented Programming

By: Gaston C. Hillar

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Learning Object-Oriented Programming
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Working with properties


It's possible to manually add getter and setter methods to emulate how properties work. For example, we can add a GetName method that just returns the value of the m_name internal field. Each time we want to retrieve a dog's name, it will be necessary to call the GetName method for that specific instance.

A dog's favorite toy may change over time. However, we still want to use getter and setter methods to keep control over the procedure of retrieving and setting the value of an underlying m_favoriteToy internal field. We always want users to change the values of a field using the getter and setter methods, just in case we need to add some code within these methods in the future. For example, we can decide that whenever a dog's favorite toy changes, it's necessary to update the dog's playfulness score. If we force the user to use the setter method whenever he/she needs to update the dog's favorite toy, we can easily add the necessary code that updates the dog's playfulness...