Question

Let us say for a moment that C# allowed multiple return values in the most pure sense, where we would expect to see something like:

string sender = message.GetSender(); string receiver = message.GetReceiver(); 

compacted to:

string sender, receiver = message.GetParticipants(); 

In that case, I do not have to understand the return values of the method until I actually make the method call. Perhaps I rely on Intellisense to tell me what return value(s) I’m dealing with, or perhaps I’m searching for a method that returns what I want from a class I am unfamiliar with.

Similarly, we have something like this, currently, in C#:

string receiver; string sender = message.GetParticipants(out receiver); 

where the argument to GetParticipants is an out string parameter. However, this is a bit different than the above because it means I have to preempt with, or at least go back and write, code that creates a variable to hold the result of the out parameter. This is a little counterintuitive.

My question is, is there any syntactic sugar in current C#, that allows a developer to make this declaration in the same line as the method call? I think it would make development a (tiny) bit more fluid, and also make the code more readable if I were doing something like:

string sender = message.GetParicipants(out string receiver); 

to show that receiver was being declared and assigned on the spot.

Answer 1

No, there isn’t currently any syntactic sugar around this. I haven’t heard of any intention to introduce any either.

I can’t say I use out parameters often enough for it really to be a significant concern for me (there are other features I’d rather the C# team spent their time on) but I agree it’s a bit annoying.