Var: Possibly the most contraversial language feature ever?

Posted on 2013-03-06 Updated on 2016-04-06

I’ve been prompted to write this post after it cropped up in my office recently, and I was reminded of a job interview I had a couple of years ago. I’ve also seen some discussions online, and wow, some people hate var. I mean really, really hate it. I even saw one guy in a post saying that if he saw a job applicant using var in an interview he would instantly refuse to hire the guy.

Now, I understand the points that the opponents of var are making, but I don’t agree. I accept that in the case of:

var data = GetData();

we can’t tell what type “data” is, but this is one of the few examples where this is the case. You might also argue that the method “GetData” has been atrociously named (okay, no arguing, it has been atrociously named), but following most programming rules I’d expect that method to return an object of type “Data”. In this example that’s probably not the case, but it does highlight my point, that this:

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