C++ getters/setters coding style

Question

I have been programming in C# for a while and now I want to brush up on my C++ skills.

Having the class:

class Foo
{
    const std::string& name         


        

Answer 1

Even though the name is immutable, you may still want to have the option of computing it rather than storing it in a field. (I realize this is unlikely for "name", but let's aim for the general case.) For that reason, even constant fields are best wrapped inside of getters:

class Foo {
    public:
        const std::string& getName() const {return name_;}
    private:
        const std::string& name_;
};

Note that if you were to change getName() to return a computed value, it couldn't return const ref. That's ok, because it won't require any changes to the callers (modulo recompilation.)