{"id":812,"date":"2010-05-05T09:19:21","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T16:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/simpleprogrammer.com\/?p=812"},"modified":"2016-07-14T15:08:34","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T19:08:34","slug":"do-you-have-a-case-of-var-guilt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simpleprogrammer.com\/do-you-have-a-case-of-var-guilt\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Have a Case of var Guilt?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever since var <\/em>was announced as a keyword for C# 3.0, I have had issues with it.\\n\\nI know that it is strongly typed, but something just felt wrong about it. \u00a0It felt like some kind of an abomination.\\n\\nPerhaps I just like to repeat myself = new Perhaps I just like to repeat myself.\\n\\nFinally, I started using the\u00a0var<\/em> keyword\u00a0because I don’t know what the heck a LINQ query returns. \u00a0I just know that if I put var at my variable declaration before my LINQ query, it just works. \u00a0Then if I put var before my variable in my foreach loop, that just works too.\\n\\nReluctantly, I started using var<\/em>\u00a0but every time I did I would start to feel guilty. \u00a0Like I did something wrong. \u00a0Like I was a bad person. \u00a0Like I was writing strongly typed VB code. \u00a0I felt dirty.\\n\\n<\/p>\n

Be clean my sons! \u00a0Throw off your shackles!<\/h2>\n

\\n\\n\"\"<\/a>\\n\\nI contemplated the issue for a good long while. \u00a0It has been months that this var keyword issue has been eating me, slowly leaking into my code. \u00a0Then, I had an epiphany!<\/strong>\\n\\nvar <\/em>is just an abstraction. \u00a0I don’t need to know the type of variables as long as the compiler does.\\n\\nThere is no need to feel guilty when using var<\/em>. \u00a0It is preventing the reader of your code from focusing on the types of the variables and instead focusing on the purpose of the variables.\\n\\nI rewrote some code using the var keyword wherever possible to see if it decreased readability at all. (I took it to the extreme)\\n\\n