readonly class property

Hello,

How can I make a public property in a class read-only?
It should be possible to modify it within methods of the class itself and the constructor/destructor.

Thanks in advance!

Make it private (within the private: section of the class), and give an accessor function. This also has the benefit that no outside code can use that variable at all.

In code:

Code:

---

class A
{
private:
  int read_only;
public:
  int getReadonly() {
    return read_only;
  }
};

---

If read_only is not a basic type but some larger struct you should return a const TYPE & instead of TYPE to avoid the copying overhead. Be aware though that badly behaving programmers could then modify the variable by const_casting the const away.

Ok, thanks. I was already afraid this was the only way, but I was hoping for a clever way to use const, static, or something else.