Question

I have two classes: a base class (Animal) and a class deriving from
it (Cat).Base class contains one virtual method Play that takes List as input parameter.Something like this

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleApplication9
{
    class Animal
    {
        public virtual void Play(List<Animal> animal) { }
    }
    class Cat : Animal
    {
        public override void Play(List<Animal> animal)
        {
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Cat cat = new Cat();
            cat.Play(new List<Cat>());
        }
    }
}

When i compile the above program,i get the following error

    Error    2    Argument 1: cannot convert from 'System.Collections.Generic.List' to 'System.Collections.Generic.List'

Is there anyway to accomplish this?

Answer 1

The reason you cannot do this is because a list is writable. Suppose it were legal, and see what goes wrong:

List<Cat> cats = new List<Cat>();
List<Animal> animals = cats; // Trouble brewing...
animals.Add(new Dog()); // hey, we just added a dog to a list of cats...
cats[0].Speak(); // Woof!

Well dog my cats, that is badness.

The feature you want is called “generic covariance” and it is supported in C# 4 for interfaces that are known to be safe. IEnumerable<T> does not have any way to write to the sequence, so it is safe.

class Animal    
{    
    public virtual void Play(IEnumerable<Animal> animals) { }    
}    
class Cat : Animal    
{    
    public override void Play(IEnumerable<Animal> animals) { }    
}    
class Program    
{    
    static void Main()    
    {    
        Cat cat = new Cat();    
        cat.Play(new List<Cat>());    
    }    
}  

That will work in C# 4 because List<Cat> is convertible to IEnumerable<Cat>, which is convertible to IEnumerable<Animal>. There is no way that Play can use IEnumerable<Animal> to add a dog to something that is actually a list of cats.