Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I am wondering how immutability is defined? If the values aren’t exposed as public, so can’t be modified, then it’s enough?
Can the values be modified inside the type, not by the customer of the type?
Or can one only set them inside a constructor? If so, in the cases of double initialization (using the this keyword on structs, etc) is still ok for immutable types?
How can I guarantee that the type is 100% immutable?
No, because you need read access.
No, because that’s still mutation.
Ding ding ding! With the additional point that immutable types often have methods that construct and return new instances, and also often have extra constructors marked
internalspecifically for use by those methods.In .Net it’s tricky to get a guarantee like this, because you can use reflection to modify (mutate) private members.