What do you call functions which get and set?

Question

The jQuery framework has a lot of functions which will either retrieve or mutate values depending on the parameters passed:

$(this).html();       // get the html
$(this).html('blah'); // set the html

Is there a standard name for functions which behave like this?

Answer 1

Is there a standard name for functions which behave like this?

Getters and Setters.

EDIT:

I just realized that you want a single function to do this. The technical term for this is a bad idea. Unless your language provides properties, trying to rig up a single function to do this is very unreadable.

Answer 2

AFAIK, there is no "standard" name for a single function that acts both as a getter and as a setter. It's an idiom not very commonly used, but it's possible in some languages, and as long as it's well documented, there's no harm in using it.

Answer 3

Some call it a property.