Redundancy in C#?

Question

Take the following snippet:

List distances = new List();

Was the redundancy intended by the language designers? If so, wh

Answer 1

What's redudant about this?

List listOfInts = new List():

Translated to English: (EDIT, cleaned up a little for clarification)

• Create a pointer of type List and name it listofInts.
• listOfInts is now created but its just a reference pointer pointing to nowhere (null)
• Now, create an object of type List on the heap, and return the pointer to listOfInts.
• Now listOfInts points to a List on the heap.

Not really verbose when you think about what it does.

Of course there is an alternative:

var listOfInts = new List();

Here we are using C#'s type inference, because you are assigning to it immediately, C# can figure out what type you want to create by the object just created in the heap.

To fully understand how the CLR handles types, I recommend reading CLR Via C#.