Property (Programming)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. A property, in some object-oriented programming languages, is a special sort of class member, intermediate between a field (or data member) and a method. Properties are read and written like fields, but property reads and writes are (usually) translated to get and set method calls. The field-like syntax is said to be easier to read and write than lots of method calls, yet the interposition of method calls allows for data validation, active updating (as of GUI visuals), and/or read-only 'fields'. That is, properties are intermediate between member code (methods) and member data (instance variables) of the class, and properties provide a higher level of encapsulation than public fields. Programming languages that support properties include Delphi/Free Pascal, Visual Basic, C#, D, eC, F#, Objective-C 2.0, ActionScript 3, JavaScript, Python and Vala.