Question

I have two private arrays in a class that runs a certain operation using a method. After this method is called, those two arrays are filled with the results. It’s not a good practice to make those arrays properties, so I was planning to have a separate property that returns a clone of the private array.

1) What is the overhead of returning a clone of the array? Is it unnoticeable in every case?

2) I could use an indexer if there was just one array. Is there a specific mechanism to use indexers for more than one array in a class?

Answer 1

I think you mean “overhead” or “cost” and not “overload”. Anyway, computationally it’s O(1) so it depends on the size of tha rray, but generally speaking Array copying is a cheap operation if it’s under a thousand elements or so.

If you don’t intend on the arrays to be modified then you could expose your private arrays by wrapping them in a ReadOnlyCollection<T> like so:

private TWhatever[] _array;
public ReadOnlyCollection<TWhatever> Elements { get; private set; }

public ClassConstructor() {
    _array = new TWhatever[1000];
    this.Elements = new ReadOnlyCollection<TWhatever>( _array );
}