Question

e.g.

public var SomeMethod()
{ 
   return "hello";
}

error:
The contextual keyword var may only appear within a local variable declaration

Thanks

Answer 1

C# only supports type inference for local variables. It doesn’t support it for the return type of a non-anonymous function. This is a design decision. It’s possible that they change it in the future. Languages like F# do in fact support return type inference so there’s no inherent impossibility involved here. Of course, sometimes, the inferred return type may be ambiguous and requires further clarification in the languages that support it:

// not real C#:
public var Method(bool returnInt) {
    if (returnInt) return 42; else return true;
}
// what's the return type of Method is going to be? ValueType? object? ...?