Is there a better alternative than this to 'switch on type'?

Question

Seeing as C# can\'t switch on a Type (which I gather wasn\'t added as a special case because is relationships mean that more than one distinct

Answer 1

You're looking for Discriminated Unions which are a language feature of F#, but you can achieve a similar effect by using a library I made, called OneOf

https://github.com/mcintyre321/OneOf

The major advantage over switch (and if and exceptions as control flow) is that it is compile-time safe - there is no default handler or fall through

void Foo(OneOf o)
{
    o.Switch(
        a => a.Hop(),
        b => b.Skip()
    );
}

If you add a third item to o, you'll get a compiler error as you have to add a handler Func inside the switch call.

You can also do a .Match which returns a value, rather than executes a statement:

double Area(OneOf o)
{
    return o.Match(
        square => square.Length * square.Length,
        circle => Math.PI * circle.Radius * circle.Radius
    );
}