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accessor

accessor

1 7.4
A small piece of code that gets a value from an object without changing it
  • noun
  • /ˈæksɛsər/
  • Specialized
translation icon : accesor
  • There is a couple of accessors which accesses bits individually.

Examples

  • But the facts of the case did not implicate the issue as raised by the defendants; the court pointed to the fact that the defendants' knowledge of the accessor's location was sufficient to establish a nexus with the federal district and to implicate that district's specific community standards.

    Academic text (2002)
  • The new organization, which promotes the idea that health is beauty, implemented a new concept: that of having experienced models counsel their younger accessors.

    Blog text (20)
  • The whole damn house is falling down, and the county accessors won't even come out and look at it.

  • I'm utilizing structs due to their public accessors.

    Blog text (13)
  • At the touch of a key, my accessors can use me to intercede with the largest and most sophisticated computers in the world today, utilizing the Internet.

    Fiction book (1999)
  • THE KIDS LOVE THE NEAT ACCESSORIES.

  • All one needs are sufficient nouns, constructors for those nouns, accessor methods for traversing the noun graph, and the all-important execute().

    Blog text (19)
  • The function serves as an accessor that retrieves the value without altering the original object.

  • In Java, you can use an accessor to get the property value of an object more easily.

  • Creating a new accessor method allows programmers to read data from an object without modifying it.

Synonyms

getter
vsaccessor
  • Specialized
2 6.1

A function that returns the value of a property on an object or class

serves as a general term for retrieval methods that do not modify data

Antonyms

setter
  • Specialized
3 7.4

A function in a computer program that gives a value to an object's property

Surface Forms

accessor singular
accessors plural

Morphology

accessor = access (transparent) = access + or

Formed predictably from the verb 'access' plus the agentive suffix '-or', so the meaning 'thing or person that accesses' is directly inferable.

Etymology

Accessor comes from access, which comes from a Latin idea meaning 'to go to' or 'approach'. So an accessor is like something that 'goes to' an object to read its value without changing it, which explains its use in programming as a way to retrieve data.