Re: [Junit-devel] getName()

[Richard K. <rki...@ab...>]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 12:20:29PM -0400, Russell Gold wrote:
> At 08:54 AM 10/22/2001 -0700, Kent Beck wrote:
> >But what does "get" mean? It seems to mean "I'm sending a message and expect
> >a reply". That is obvious from context.
> >
> >I don't mean to re-start a war that has probably been fought 1000 times, but
> >under what circumstances do you have a method with a non-void return type
> >and you don't prefix its name with "get"?
> 
> well, if it has a boolean value, you often prefix it's name with "is"...
> 
> I agree with you that I don't like the 'get' prefix; however, with the 
> introduction of JavaBeans in JDK 1.1, getXXX became a Java language naming 
> convention. Most Java programmers now expect a getXXX method for any 
> "property" of a class.  For those of us who came to Java from other 
> languages it is annoying - but it is widespread enough that it probably 
> should not be changed.

I always thought that when a method name starts with get, it is
like an informal promise that the state of the object will not
change by calling this method (or at least the change will not be
perceivable to the external user of the class -- for example, it
might load and cache data that was not yet loaded).

    - rick

-- 
Richard Kilgore
rki...@ab...