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

Because declaring a type doesn't necessarily have anything to do with initializing it.

I can declare

List foo; 

and leave it to be initialized later. Where's the redundancy then? Maybe it receives the value from another function like BuildList().

As others have mentioned the new var keyword lets you get around that, but you have to initialize the variable at declaration so that the compiler can tell what type it is.