Question

In JavaScript there is the idea of truthy and falsy values.

e.g.

• 0 : Always false
• 1 : Always true
• ‘0’ : Always true
• ‘1’ : Always true

Is there an equivalent list of truthy and falsey values in the C# language on the .NET framework?

The reason I would like to know this is that I find myself doing the following

if(obj != null)
{
   // Do something with the object
}

When I could write the following

if(obj)
{
   // Do something with the object
}

Answer 1

C# only has literal true and false values.

C# requires you to be very explicit in your declarations. This behaves like other popular strongly-typed languages, as opposed to JavaScript which can do implicit conversions when needed.

It should be noted for clarity that "strong typing" is not the reason why C# doesn’t implicitly convert to "truthy/falsy" values. The language intentionally is trying to avoid the pitfalls of some other compiled languages like C where certain values can be truthy, like ‘0‘ or ‘1‘ which could allow you to make a syntactical mistake you might not notice until runtime when your code behaves unexpectedly.