4.7. Instance fields

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Instance fields can be accessed as functions, both for reading and writing. Suppose that we have a Java class that looks as follows:

public class Foo {
  public String bar;
}

We can access the bar field as follows:

let foo = Foo()

# Write
foo: bar("baz")

# Read, prints "baz"
println(foo: bar())

An interesting behavior when writing fields is that the "methods" return the object, which means that you can chain invocations.

Suppose that we have a Java class as follows:

public class Foo {
  public String bar;
  public String baz;
}

We can set all fields by chaining invocations as in:

let foo = Foo(): bar(1): baz(2)

It should be noted that Golo won’t bypass the regular Java visibility access rules on fields.

Back to the previous example, suppose that we have both a field and a method with the same name, as in:

public class Foo {
  public String bar;

  public String bar() {
    return bar;
  }
}

Golo resolves methods first, fields last. Hence, the following Golo code will resolve the bar() method, not the bar field:

let foo = Foo()

# Write the field
foo: bar("baz")

# Calls the bar() method
println(foo: bar())