From: John Lam <drjflam@...>
Date: 2006-05-04T14:02:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby idiom for attributes / properties

------=_Part_74316_20083937.1146718965775
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Disposition: inline

On 5/4/06, James Britt <james_b@neurogami.com> wrote:
>
> What would you consider to be an attribute?


I'm just borrowing the ActiveRecord terminology for attributes. In my mind,
an attribute =3D=3D a property. In .NET, a property is a bit of syntactical
sugar (but also a distinct metadata entity) for a getter and setter method.

Consider this bit of C# code:

class Foo {
  public string StringProperty {
    get { return "string"; }
    set { Console.WriteLine("setting a string to " + value); }
  }
}

This generates under the covers a get_StringProperty and a
set_StringProperty method.

I would consider it equivalent to this Ruby code:

class Foo
  def string_property
     'string'
  end
  def string_property=3D(value)
    puts "setting a string to #{value}"
  end
end

The problem is that I can't distinguish a string_property method from any
other method. In .NET, I can walk the property metadata to discover all of
those properties (and those are things that can be bound to data-aware
controls in the framework).

------=_Part_74316_20083937.1146718965775--