“GetOrCreate” - does that idiom have an established name?

Question

Ok, consider this common idiom that most of us have used many times (I assume):

class FooBarDictionary
{
    private Dictionary fooBars;

          


        

Answer 1

I'm unsure of overall programming name for the high level pattern, but Perl has this wonderful behavior called Autovivification - namely, automatically creating hash (map) key with undefined value when you're querying the value of non-existing key in the hash.