Comments on: var Keyword In C#

By: Deepak

Deepak — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 22:32:29 +0000

Hi JohnG,

Thanks for your comment. I am also a believer of readable code and I find var to be elegant in certain situations. Of course a balance has to be provided.

By: JohnG

JohnG — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:44:24 +0000

In my experience “var” makes code more readable. I find it quite obvious to get the type. The only dubious use of “var” to me is potentially the return type of a method call where it isn’t clear what the method is returning. Still a well written method name can help a lot (without adding the return type to the name).

If I see var message = GetMessage(); I would generally infer a string.

I am a big believer in preferring readable code over code comments but I find overly verbose code less readable. The less cluttered the code the more readable it is to me.

And I have to look at a lot of other peoples’ code in code review.
In my industry we do a lot of code review and I am very pleased when people use var I do not find it in anyway a hindrance.

By: Deepak

Deepak — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:16:41 +0000

Jason,

I could not agree more with you. You have to use var judiciously. It adds most value when working with anonymous types. I do not have problems using var once in a while but I stay away from using it for every declaration.

By: Json

Json — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:57:20 +0000

But really…what’s the point of using var on something of known type? Like you said, var is specialized for dynamic frameworks and languages like Lambda and LINQ, where you don’t know what’s coming back.

When you do something like:
var myName = “Json”; //what tha hell is the point of this?

It DOES make code hard to read when var is applied out of context.
There is no logical reason not to put:
string myName = “Json”;

You don’t buy anything beneficial from using var for KNOWN data types. Because on the right side of the equal sign guess what, you KNOW the data type. It’s silly…