Re: [Vala] [Genie] Object members

[Patrick Castle <lemeia bigpond com>]

Jamie McCracken wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 01:50 +1100, Patrick Castle wrote:
>   
> > Thanks for that. I looked back at the Genie page and did a bit of Googling. I think I understand the 
> > distinction between field and property. It would seem from a good practice point of view that fields would 
> > generally be private and properties would generally be public. Would that be a reasonable way to explain it? 
> > If so - I understand where I would want to use one or the other.
> >
> >     
>
> no
>
> You would use a property mainly for design time setting as they can be
> introspected (EG think glade and setting properties on a widget when
> designing) or if you needed explicit getter/setter methods or the
> ability to override them. 
>
> Fields by comparison are for runtime usage only and cannot be
> introspected nor can they have get/set methods or be readonly or
> virtual/overridable etc
>
>
> jamie
>
>
>   
Hmmm - maybe I'm just not understanding then. To me properties would be 
a way of implementing the idea of information hiding or encapsulation - 
so that I create an interface separated from the implementation. I'm 
actually guessing that this is exactly what I could use properties for 
as it fits with the idea (in my mind anyway). And in this way, I would 
probably make the decision to make fields private and properties public.

Am I at least right that this would be a valid use of properties?

I'm struggling a little with the introspection idea. I'll have to mull 
that over a bit and perhaps do a bit more reading.

Regards
Patrick