“GetOrCreate” - does that idiom have an established name?

Question

Ok, consider this common idiom that most of us have used many times (I assume):

class FooBarDictionary
{
    private Dictionary fooBars;

          


        

Answer 1

It sort of depends why you're doing it - the idiom is one I've seen be called memoization, caching, initialisation on demand, create on first use. Normally I call the method "ensureFoo" rather than "GetOrCreate"