Why doesn’t the C# compiler stop properties from referring to themselves?

You can see the “official” reason in the last comment here.

Posted by Microsoft on 14/11/2008 at
19:52

Thanks for the suggestion for
Visual Studio!

You are right that we could easily
detect property recursion, but we
can’t guarantee that there is nothing
useful being accomplished by the
recursion. The body of the property
could set other fields on your object
which change the behavior of the next
recursion, could change its behavior
based on user input from the console,
or could even behave differently based
on random values. In these cases, a
self-recursive property could indeed
terminate the recursion, but we have
no way to determine if that’s the case
at compile-time (without solving the
halting problem!).

For the reasons above (and the
breaking change it would take to
disallow this), we wouldn’t be able to
prohibit self-recursive properties.

Alex Turner

Program Manager

Visual C# Compiler