indexers and arrays

[sclement]

Hi

I have a class which has several members which are arrays of doubles. I am trying to figure out the best way to access these arrays.

Is it best to use properties:

private static double[] _dcount = new double[20];

public static double [] _dcount
{
get { return _dcount; }
set { _dcount = value; }
}

or to write accessor functions ?

I thought about using indexers, but if I am reading my books correctly they won't work if there are several arrays of the same type in the class.

Any help would be appreciated

cheers

simon

[BigEd781]

Properties are accessor methods, C# just gives you some nice syntactic sugar to make your life easier. So, use properties.

However, do you really need to expose raw arrays like that? Why not maintain List<T> private fields and expose them as an IList<T> or a ReadOnlyCollection?

[sclement]

Thanks BigEd

I changed my code so that the arrays were no longer exposed. I'd be curious to see an example using IList

cheers

simon

[BigEd781]

List<T> implements the IList interface, so you can treat it as an IList implicitly.

class Foo
{
    private List<int> _someList;

    public IList<int> SomeList
    {
        get { return _someList; }
    }
}

exposing an interface is nice because someday you may change the List<T> to some other collection that also implements IList. If that happens none of the client code needs to change, you simply change the declaration of _someList.

[sclement]

Thanks for your help

cheers

simon