No, there’s no way of doing this. For instance, if you return a List<string>
(and it’s not immutable) then callers will be able to add entries.
The normal way round this is to return an immutable wrapper, e.g. ReadOnlyCollection<T>
.
For other mutable types, you may need to clone the value before returning it.
Note that just returning an immutable interface view (e.g. returning IEnumerable<T>
instead of List<T>
) won’t stop a caller from casting back to the mutable type and mutating.
EDIT: Note that apart from anything else, this kind of concern is one of the reasons why immutable types make it easier to reason about code 🙂