Environment.GetCommandLineArgs - why is it a method? Why not a property?

Question

I'm trying to understand the design considerations of the team that created the method Environment.GetCommandLineArgs.

It could have been a static property, very much like System.Web.HttpContext.Current. After all, the returned value should not change once available. So it's more like a property of the current running process.

I know that any property in .NET is a syntactic sugar to getter/setter methods. But that's the exact reason for using a property rather than an explicit getter method.

Or maybe there is there something I'm missing here?

What do you think?

Answer 1

I suspect it's because it makes a copy of the array each time you call it. For example, consider this program:

using System;

public class Test
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string[] argsCopy = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();
        args[0] = "x";

        // 0 is the command in this case
        argsCopy[1] = "y";

        string[] argsCopy2 = Environment.GetCommandLineArgs();
        Console.WriteLine(argsCopy2[1]);
    }
}

If you run this with "test original" it will still print out "original".

So when you say:

After all, the returned value should not change once available.

Actually, it will return a different value (a new array reference) on every call, precisely because arrays are always mutable.