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If I do this I get a System.StackOverflowException:
private string abc = ""; public string Abc { get { return Abc; // Note the mistaken capitalization } } I understand why -- the property is referencing itself, leading to an infinite loop. (See previous questions here and here).
What I'm wondering (and what I didn't see answered in those previous questions) is why doesn't the C# compiler catch this mistake? It checks for some other kinds of circular reference (classes inheriting from themselves, etc.), right? Is it just that this mistake wasn't common enough to be worth checking for? Or is there some situation I'm not thinking of, when you'd want a property to actually reference itself in this way?
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There is no string type in C . You have to use char arrays. By the way your code will not work ,because the size of the array should allow for the whole array to fit in plus one additional zero terminating character.
Because C comes after B The reason why the language was named “C” by its creator was that it came after B language. Back then, Bell Labs already had a programming language called “B” at their disposal.
As such, C programming does not provide direct support for error handling but being a system programming language, it provides you access at lower level in the form of return values. Most of the C or even Unix function calls return -1 or NULL in case of any error and set an error code errno.
This is due to the fact that C++ does not do bounds checking. Languages like Java and python have bounds checking so if you try to access an out of bounds element, they throw an error. C++ design principle was that it shouldn't be slower than the equivalent C code, and C doesn't do array bounds checking.
You can see the "official" reason in the last comment here.
Posted by Microsoft on 14/11/2008 at 19:52
Thanks for the suggestion for Visual Studio!
You are right that we could easily detect property recursion, but we can't guarantee that there is nothing useful being accomplished by the recursion. The body of the property could set other fields on your object which change the behavior of the next recursion, could change its behavior based on user input from the console, or could even behave differently based on random values. In these cases, a self-recursive property could indeed terminate the recursion, but we have no way to determine if that's the case at compile-time (without solving the halting problem!).
For the reasons above (and the breaking change it would take to disallow this), we wouldn't be able to prohibit self-recursive properties.
Alex Turner
Program Manager
Visual C# Compiler
164
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