what is a member vs. a property

A property is one kind of member. Others might be constructors, methods, fields, nested types, conversions, indexers etc – depending on the language/platform, of course. A lot of the time the exact meaning of terminology depends on the context.

To give a C#-specific definition, from the C# 3.0 spec, section 1.6.1:

The following table provides an overview of the kinds of members a class can contain.
(Rows for…)

  • Constants
  • Fields
  • Methods
  • Properties
  • Indexers
  • Events
  • Operators
  • Constructors
  • Destructors
  • Types

Note that that’s members of a class. Different “things” have different kinds of members – in C#, an interface can’t have a field as a member, for example.

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