The purpose of a getter or setter is to abstract the implementation out from the usage. Computed properties (e.g. C#'s ability to replace a concrete property wi

The purpose of a getter or setter is to abstract the implementation out from the usage. Computed properties (e.g. C#'s ability to replace a concrete property with a virtual property without breaking any code) do this without requiring mindless implementation (boilerplate code) for the common case (a property that is exactly what it seems to be). As an added bonus, you don't need to write foo.getBar(), you can just write foo.bar and it Just Works, whether foo.bar is a concrete implementation or a computed property. Look at this blog post for example: http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-properties-without http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-properties-without The sad thing is the request here is for something more ugly than what is really wanted (this is just automatic getter/setter implementation -- computed properties are better both for developers and consumers of their output.