Question

Was surprised to see that a C# Enum definition seems to allow an extra comma at the end (at least in VS2010).

e.g. :

public enum EnumTest1
{
    Abc,
    Def,
}

i.e. there is a comma at the end of “Def”.
Just wondering if this is allowed by design, or is an oversight.
(This might be good to know, because if it is a bug, there may be no guarantees that code like the above will compile in future versions of C#).

Answer 1

It is allowed by design. Similarly, you can have trailing commas in initializers as well. For example:

var ints = new[] { 2, 3, 4, 3, };

var obj = new SomeClass { Prop1 = "foo", Prop2 = "bar", };

I think that allowing trailing commas makes creating auto-generated code much easier because you don’t have to add last-in-the-list logic when outputting a list in your code.