C# 3.0 Type Inference

  • 2 minutes to read
  • edit

One of the new language features of the C# 3.0 language release is type inference. Wikipedia has an excellent discussion on type inference, including a non-technical and technical explanation.

C# 3.0 introduces the concept of type inference with the var keyword. At first glance, this looks a lot like the old Variant keyword of Visual Basic. It isn’t!

One of the compelling features of C# is that it is a strongly typed language whose variables are statically typed. The var keyword doesn’t change this; it simply lets the compiler infer the variables data type from its context. To help clear this mystery up, lets look at an example:

In C# 2.0, you can write:

int i;
i = 1;

or simply:

int i = 1;

In C# 3.0, you can also write this as:

var i = 1;

What this actually means to the compiler is that the variable i is of the same data type as it’s initializer. In this case, i would end up being compiled as an int. The key here is that i is still strongly typed. The other thing to realize is that the var keyword is only valid within the body of a method. You can’t use it define class-wide variables that have an inferred type.

The var keyword was added to support anonymous types, another new feature in C# 3.0. Without this keyword, you wouldn’t be able to create a variable of an anonymous type if you always needed to specify the type. An interesting side-effect of the var keyword is that you no longer have to specify the type name twice when you declare a variable.

List<string> list = new List<string>();
var list = new List<string>();

The most important things to remember are:

  1. var != object != Variant
  2. You can only use the var keyword inside a method body.
Comments