Field (computer science)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Field" computer science – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

In computer science, data that has several parts, known as a record, can be divided into fields (data fields). Relational databases arrange data as sets of database records, so called rows. Each record consists of several fields; the fields of all records form the columns. Examples of fields: name, gender, hair colour.

In object-oriented programming, a field (also called data member or member variable) is a particular piece of data encapsulated within a class or object. In the case of a regular field (also called instance variable), for each instance of the object there is an instance variable: for example, an Employee class has a Name field and there is one distinct name per employee. A static field (also called class variable) is one variable, which is shared by all instances.^[1] Fields are abstracted by properties, which allow them to be read and written as if they were fields, but these can be translated to getter and setter method calls.