inside a Solidity contract there is a declaration as follows:
contract Lottery is VRFConsumerBase, Ownable {
address payable[] public players;
...
...
elsewhere in the same contract,there is a an assignment as follows:
....
....
recentWinner = players[someIndex];
....
....
}
the deploy.py Python script is used to deploy the contract. the function deploying the contract is:
def deploy_lottery():
Lottery.deploy(....)
....
....
After deployment and doing other stuff... the contract's recentWinner variable is accessed from python script using parenthesis as follows:
def end_lottery():
print(f"{lottery.recentWinner()} is the winner!")
My rather basic question is, why are parenthesis used? recentWinner is not a function that was defined in the Lottery contract. If I ran the script without the paranthesis, I get the following output.
<ContractCall 'recentWinner()'> is the winner!
Terminating local RPC client...
so it seems like the paranthesis is necessary. can somebody explain what is going on please? why should I treat this variable like a function in order to retrieve its value? if you can also point me to some related posts/reading material that would be much appreciated. thank you!
EVM does not have public variables, only public accessor functions.
Behind the scenes, the Solidity compiler generates a function called recentWinner() for you. This is called accessor or getter function. Unlike in Java etc. languages there is no get prefix for the function.