C#-like properties in native C++?

Question

In C# / .NET you can do something like this:

someThing.text = \"blah\";
String blah = someThing.text;

However, the above code does not actu

Answer 1

Moo-Juice's answer looks really cool, but has a drawback: you can't use these properties like normal expressions of type T, as you can in C#.

For instance,

• a.text.c_str() won't compile (‘class Property >’ has no member named ‘c_str’)
• std::cout << a.text won't compile either (template argument deduction/substitution failed)

I would suggest the following enhancement to template class Property:

T& operator() ()
{
    return _value;
}
T const& operator() () const
{
    return _value;
}

Then you can access the property's members with (), such as:

 char const *p = a.text().c_str();

And you can use the property in expressions where the type must be deduced:

std::cout << a.text();