Question

I tend to assume that getters are little more than an access control wrapper around an otherwise fairly lightweight set of instructions to return a value (or set of values).

As a result, when I find myself writing longer and more CPU-hungry setters, I feel Perhaps this is not the smartest move. In calling a getter in my own code (in particular let’s refer to C# where there is a syntactical difference between method vs. getter calls), then I make an implicit assumption that these are lightweight — when in fact that may well not be the case.

What’s the general consensus on this? Use of other people’s libraries aside, do you write heavy getters? Or do you tend to treat heavier getters as "full methods"?

PS. Due to language differences, I expect there’ll be quite a number of different thoughts on this…

Answer 1

True. Getters should either access a simple member, or should compute and cache a derived value and then return the cached value (subsequent gets without interleaved sets should merely return that value). If I have a function that is going to do a lot of computation, then I name it computeX, not getX.