Word describing creation if not pre-existing and fetching from memory if existing already

Question

Yeah, the title isn't the smoothest, sorry about that.

I'm programming a property and I want to name it in the most intuitive way. Extra bonus if it's a short one. Please note that there's no emphasis whatsoever on the term being broadly known, self-explanatory nor trivially interpreted. It's good if some or all of the properties are possible to achieve but it's by no means a requirement.

There's a method for computing an area to a polygon and it's called Area. However, it's being accessed very frequently so I've improved it so it doesn't need to compute the area every time. Only if the area hasn't been computed (or needs being recalculated), the actual calculation will take place. In every other occasion, I retrieve it from the pre-computed storage.

And here's the linguistic issue. Naturally, I'd call the method

ComputeIfNeededThenStoreAndAfterwardsRetrieveArea

but that's only nice to the eyes of a computer, not a human. I could, of course, be vague on the actual implementation details and go

ComputeArea

or maybe even

ComputeCacheableArea

but it seems to me plausible that there might be a verb conveying that precise message with a fewer and shorter words. Is there such a verb, please?

Answer 1

What you are doing is caching results and then retreiving from cache if possible later.

Do the calling functions really need to know if the result is cached or not? If not, don't worry about exposing those implementation details in the function name, but document it in your function's comments.

Otherwise, for the functions that try to retrieve by cache, I'd just tack on _cached on the end of the function name.

Answer 2

The convention in most object-oriented languages used in the United States is to not bother the method's client with the details of the caching. (For that matter, the client usually does not need to know that caching happens at all.) For example, you might have:

class Rectangle extends Shape {
    bool hasCachedArea = false;
    decimal cachedArea = 0.0M;

    decimal Area() {
        if (hasCachedArea == false) {
            decimal area  = Width() * Height();
            cachedArea    = area;
            hasCachedArea = true;
        }
        return cachedArea;
    }
}