I was recently re-examining VF's property syntax and decided it was a bit flawed. I haven't been entirely happy with the implicit property approach, so I think I'll be giving VF "proper" properties.

Here's an example of the syntax I have in mind in its simplest form. It strongly resembles a Dim/Var declaration.

Code:

Class Pen   Property Color As UInt End Class Pen #pen #pen Color = &HFF0000 End

You can associate getter and setter methods with a property by using the ON keyword.

Code:

Property name   [ On Get     [statements] ]   [ On Set param     [statements] ] End Property

Let's say we want to prevent invalid values being assigned to Color.

Code:

Class Pen    Property Color As UInt      On Set value        value And= &HFFFFFF    End Property End Class

If you are familiar with VB.NET, the following is functionally equivalent to the above code.

Code:

Public Class Pen   Private _color As Integer   Public Property Color() As Integer     Get       Return _color     End Get     Set (ByBal value As Integer)       _color = value And &HFFFFFF     End Set   End Property End Class

Here are some things to notice:

• VF's properties will allocate a variable for you.
  
• VF's properties are always public.
  
• VF's use of "Get" and "Set" do not represent keywords. They are simply labels that can be anything you want.
  
• VF's setter method assumes its parameter has the same type as the property itself.
  
• VF's getter and setter are simply guard clauses. They do not explicitly return or modify the underlying variable, but instead can prevent or override the default behavior.

I like your approach, which contains some helpful automatisms.

Having to specify the type of the parameters twice is really something that should be avoided.
.NET is good, but it has its own syntactical drawbacks.