C# lets you call another constructor from a given constructor, but only before the body of the calling constructor runs: public C(int x) : this(x, null) { // … } public C(int x, string y) { // … } Why can you call another constructor at the beginning...

As I’ve discussed before, we try to reserve warnings for only those situations where we can say with almost certainty that the code is broken, misleading or useless. One reason for trying to ensure that warnings are not “false positives” is that we don...

Today, another dialogue, and another episode of my ongoing series "what's the difference?" What’s the difference, if any, between a “destructor” and a “finalizer”? Both are mechanisms for cleaning up a resource when it is no longer in use. When...

UPDATE: I have discovered that this issue is considerably weirder than the initial bug report led me to believe. I've rewritten the examples in this article; the previous ones did not actually demonstrate the bug. Consider the following code: struct...

Reader Jesse McGrew asks an excellent follow-up question to my 2005 post about why you cannot access a protected member from a derived class . (You probably want to re-read that post in order to make sense of this one.) I want to be clear in my terminology...

When you have a nested loop, sometimes you want to “continue” the outer loop, not the inner loop. For example, here we have a sequence of criteria and a sequence of items, and we wish to determine if there is any item which matches every criterion: ...

Well, enough chit-chat, back to programming language design. Suppose you’re building electronic piano software. As we’ve discussed before, the “equal temperament” tuning for a piano goes like this: the 49th note from the left on a standard 88 key piano...

Happy New Year all, and welcome to 2010, or, as my friend Professor Orbifold prefers it, MMX. I hope your festive holiday season was as festive and enjoyable as mine. The extended Lippert family continues to grow; this year at the annual Boxing Day...