There seem to be three choices for implementing publicly accessible constants in C#. I'm curious if there are any good reasons to choose one over the other or if it's just a matter of personal preference.

Choice 1 - private field plus property getter

private const string _someConstant = "string that will never change";

public string SomeConstant
{
    get { return _someConstant; }
}

Choice 2 - property getter only

public string SomeConstant
{
    get { return "string that will never change"; }
}

Choice 3 - public field only

public const string SomeConstant = "string that will never change";

Which do you recommend and why?

Update

Apparently, this has turned into a discussion of whether to use const or static readonly. Not exactly what I intended, but it did teach me that Choice 3 is definitely a bad idea because, if the value of the const changes in a future version, it requires all referencing assemblies to be recompiled.

However, I don't think anyone has really discussed Choice 2 yet. I'm still curious if there's any disadvantage with having just a getter that returns a value and nothing else.

c# constants
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