Question

Compare

String.Format('Hello {0}', 'World'); 

with

'Hello {0}'.Format('World'); 

Why did the .Net designers choose a static method over an instance method? What do you think?

Answer 1

I don’t actually know the answer but I suspect that it has something to do with the aspect of invoking methods on string literals directly.

If I recall correctly (I didn’t actually verify this because I don’t have an old IDE handy), early versions of the C# IDE had trouble detecting method calls against string literals in IntelliSense, and that has a big impact on the discoverability of the API. If that was the case, typing the following wouldn’t give you any help:

'{0}'.Format(12); 

If you were forced to type

new String('{0}').Format(12); 

It would be clear that there was no advantage to making the Format method an instance method rather than a static method.

The .NET libraries were designed by a lot of the same people that gave us MFC, and the String class in particular bears a strong resemblance to the CString class in MFC. MFC does have an instance Format method (that uses printf style formatting codes rather than the curly-brace style of .NET) which is painful because there’s no such thing as a CString literal. So in a MFC codebase that I worked on I see a lot of this:

CString csTemp = ''; csTemp.Format('Some string: %s', szFoo); 

which is painful. (I’m not saying that the code above is a great way to do things even in MFC, but that does seem to be the way that most of the developers on the project learned how to use CString::Format). Coming from that heritage, I can imagine that the API designers were trying to avoid that sort of situation again.