what is a member vs. a property

Question

A friend who is new to OO programming asked me the difference between a Member and Property, and I was ashamed to admit that I couldn\'t give him a good answer. Since proper

Answer 1

A property is one kind of member. Others might be constructors, methods, fields, nested types, conversions, indexers etc - depending on the language/platform, of course. A lot of the time the exact meaning of terminology depends on the context.

To give a C#-specific definition, from the C# 3.0 spec, section 1.6.1:

The following table provides an overview of the kinds of members a class can contain.
(Rows for...)

• Constants
• Fields
• Methods
• Properties
• Indexers
• Events
• Operators
• Constructors
• Destructors
• Types

Note that that's members of a class. Different "things" have different kinds of members - in C#, an interface can't have a field as a member, for example.