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Target-Typed Conditional Expression

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Note

This article is a feature specification. The specification serves as the design document for the feature. It includes proposed specification changes, along with information needed during the design and development of the feature. These articles are published until the proposed spec changes are finalized and incorporated in the current ECMA specification.

There may be some discrepancies between the feature specification and the completed implementation. Those differences are captured in the pertinent language design meeting (LDM) notes.

You can learn more about the process for adopting feature speclets into the C# language standard in the article on the specifications.

Conditional Expression Conversion

For a conditional expression c ? e1 : e2, when

  1. there is no common type for e1 and e2, or
  2. for which a common type exists but one of the expressions e1 or e2 has no implicit conversion to that type

we define a new implicit conditional expression conversion that permits an implicit conversion from the conditional expression to any type T for which there is a conversion-from-expression from e1 to T and also from e2 to T. It is an error if a conditional expression neither has a common type between e1 and e2 nor is subject to a conditional expression conversion.

Better Conversion from Expression

We change

Better conversion from expression

Given an implicit conversion C1 that converts from an expression E to a type T1, and an implicit conversion C2 that converts from an expression E to a type T2, C1 is a better conversion than C2 if E does not exactly match T2 and at least one of the following holds:

to

Better conversion from expression

Given an implicit conversion C1 that converts from an expression E to a type T1, and an implicit conversion C2 that converts from an expression E to a type T2, C1 is a better conversion than C2 if E does not exactly match T2 and at least one of the following holds:

  • E exactly matches T1 (§11.6.4.4)
  • C1 is not a conditional expression conversion and C2 is a conditional expression conversion.
  • T1 is a better conversion target than T2 (§11.6.4.6) and either C1 and C2 are both conditional expression conversions or neither is a conditional expression conversion.

Cast Expression

The current C# language specification says

A cast_expression of the form (T)E, where T is a type and E is a unary_expression, performs an explicit conversion (§10.3) of the value of E to type T.

In the presence of the conditional expression conversion there may be more than one possible conversion from E to T. With the addition of conditional expression conversion, we prefer any other conversion to a conditional expression conversion, and use the conditional expression conversion only as a last resort.

Design Notes

The reason for the change to Better conversion from expression is to handle a case such as this:

M(b ? 1 : 2);

void M(short);
void M(long);

This approach does have two small downsides. First, it is not quite the same as the switch expression:

M(b ? 1 : 2); // calls M(long)
M(b switch { true => 1, false => 2 }); // calls M(short)

This is still a breaking change, but its scope is less likely to affect real programs:

M(b ? 1 : 2, 1); // calls M(long, long) without this feature; ambiguous with this feature.

M(short, short);
M(long, long);

This becomes ambiguous because the conversion to long is better for the first argument (because it does not use the conditional expression conversion), but the conversion to short is better for the second argument (because short is a better conversion target than long). This breaking change seems less serious because it does not silently change the behavior of an existing program.

The reason for the notes on the cast expression is to handle a case such as this:

_ = (short)(b ? 1 : 2);

This program currently uses the explicit conversion from int to short, and we want to preserve the current language meaning of this program. The change would be unobservable at runtime, but with the following program the change would be observable:

_ = (A)(b ? c : d);

where c is of type C, d is of type D, and there is an implicit user-defined conversion from C to D, and an implicit user-defined conversion from D to A, and an implicit user-defined conversion from C to A. If this code is compiled before C# 9.0, when b is true we convert from c to D then to A. If we use the conditional expression conversion, then when b is true we convert from c to A directly, which executes a different sequence of user code. Therefore we treat the conditional expression conversion as a last resort in a cast, to preserve existing behavior.