C# constructors annoy me!

[Helge Jensen]

In that case, what would you expect to happen if classes inherited
constructors and someone used the parameterless contructor inherited
(directly or indirectly) from System.Object?

One could propose a variance of default-construction that could be
claimed to be akin to "constructor-inheritance" and which makes a bit
more sense than the parameterless-default-constructor definition.

Instead of a parameterless constructor, a class will have
default-constructors corresponding to it's super-class' constructors,
all implemented by simply invoking base(...) with the arguments.

Notice that for classes with only a parameterless constructor this
yields the same semantics as now.

If *any* constructor is declared in a class, *no* default constructors
are generated, as it is now.

Also, defaulting to constructing the super-class using it's
parameterless constructor is somewhat error-prone. One could argue that
required explicit declaration of parent-construction would be "in the
spirit" of C#.

But all that's too late now, we're stuck with a default parameterless
constructor in C# -- but so are most other languages so it's not much of
a competitive parameter.

 

[Peter Morris [Droopy eyes software]]

In that case, what would you expect to happen if classes inherited

constructors and someone used the parameterless contructor inherited
(directly or indirectly) from System.Object?

That's simple. In the base class I would implement a parameterless
constructor and mark it as obsolete.

 

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

That's simple. In the base class I would implement a parameterless
constructor and mark it as obsolete.

Euch - I really don't like that idea. For one thing, it means that you
have to do that for every overload you *don't* want to support for all
your base classes - and if an extra constructor is added to the base
class in a new version, you may not even notice. Do you really want to
have to check for new constructors for all your base classes all the
time?

I think it's better to say what constructors you explicitly *do* want
to support, personally.