Why doesn't the C# compiler stop properties from referring to themselves?

Question

If I do this I get a System.StackOverflowException:

private string abc = \"\";
public string Abc
{
    get
    { 
        return Abc; // Note th         


        

Answer 1

Another point in addition to Alex's explanation is that we try to give warnings for code which does something that you probably didn't intend, such that you could accidentally ship with the bug.

In this particular case, how much time would the warning actually save you? A single test run. You'll find this bug the moment you test the code, because it always immediately crashes and dies horribly. The warning wouldn't actually buy you much of a benefit here. The likelihood that there is some subtle bug in a recursive property evaluation is low.

By contrast, we do give a warning if you do something like this:

int customerId; 
...
this.customerId= this.customerId;

There's no horrible crash-and-die, and the code is valid code; it assigns a value to a field. But since this is nonsensical code, you probably didn't mean to do it. Since it's not going to die horribly, we give a warning that there's something here that you probably didn't intend and might not otherwise discover via a crash.