Question

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Properties vs Methods

For many situations it is obvious whether something should be a property or a method however there are items that might be considered ambiguous.

Obvious Properties:

• “name”
• “length”

Obvious Methods:

• “SendMessage”
• “Print”

Ambiguous:

• “Valid” / “IsValid” / “Validate”
• “InBounds” / “IsInBounds” / “CheckBounds”
• “AverageChildValue” / “CalcAverageChildValue”
• “ColorSaturation” / “SetColorSaturation”

I suppose I would lean towards methods for the ambiguous, but does anyone know of a rule or convention that helps decide this? E.g. should all properties be O(1)? Should a property not be able to change other data (ColorSaturation might change R,G,B values)? Should it not be a property if there is calculation or aggregation?

Just from an academic perspective, (and not because I think it’s a good idea) is there a reason not to go crazy with properties and just make everything that is an interrogation of the class without taking an argument, and everything that can be changed about the class with a single argument and cant fail, a property?

Answer 1

I typically convert a property to a function if it has one of the following behaviors

• Causes a side effect (other than setting the backing field)
• Implementation is expensive when compared to say a field access
• Implementation has higher complexity than Log(N)
• Can throw an exception