Why is this method call on a property causing a stack overflow?

Question

I was writing a bubblesort in C# and ran into this problem. Below are my classes and after the classes I will describe my problem.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace BubbleSort
{
class Person
{
    public String FirstName { get; set; }
    public String LastName {get; set;}
    public String PhoneNumber { get; set; }
    public Person(String firstName, String lastName)
    {
        FirstName = firstName;
        LastName = lastName;

    }
}
}



using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections;

namespace BubbleSort
{
class ListProvider
{
    //Class Variables
    private StreamReader fileReader;
    //private List<Person> test;

    #region Properties
    public List<Person> TheList
    {
        get { return TheList; }
        set { TheList = value; }
    }
    #endregion

    /// <summary>
    /// I wish C# had a Scanner class :/. How different are these languages really?
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="fileName"></param>
    public ListProvider(string fileName)
    {
       // test = new List<Person>();            
            using (fileReader = new StreamReader(fileName))
            {
                String line = "";
                while (fileReader.Peek() != -1)
                {
                    line = fileReader.ReadLine();
                    String[] nameArray = line.Split(' ');

                    TheList.Add(new Person(nameArray[0], nameArray[1]));
                    //test.Add(new Person(nameArray[0], nameArray[1]));
                }
            }
        }


}
}


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

namespace BubbleSort
{
class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        ListProvider listProvider = new ListProvider("C:\\Users\\JC Boss\\Desktop\\Career\\Programming Practice\\BubbleSort\\BubbleSort\\names.txt");
        foreach (Person person in listProvider.TheList)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(person.FirstName + " " + person.LastName);
        }
    }

Okay. So when I try and add a new Person to this list, I get a stack overflow exception. Now, if I were to uncomment the List variable test, and add to that. It would work fine, and would throw no error. Why is this happening? I looked around but could not see why this would happen to a property? } }

Answer 1

public List<Person> TheList
{
    get { return TheList; }
    set { TheList = value; }
}

This setter refers to itself. Any attempt to read or write to it will cause an infinite recursion.