Shortcut Formatting: A feature request for C# vNext!

January 10, 2008

I’ve been pondering what possible features could be added to C# after version 3.5 of the compiler. For sure things like parallelism constructs are on the radar for the language team at Microsoft, but while they are at it I would like them to tackle a simpler challenge as well – a shortcut for formatting strings.

Let’s say that my code is going to throw and exception, I typically need to build the error message to load into the exception message. That could be expressed as:

throw new Exception(string.Format(”{0}{1}{2}”, a, b, c));

But I think we could have a nicer inline string format syntax:

throw new Exception(  @(”{0}{1}{2}”|a|b|c)  );

I’m not sure about the syntax, but the idea is a more compact syntax that would look good inline, especially if you had nested object constructions, like a LINQ projection.

Posted by Mitch Denny
Filed in Uncategorized
9 Comments »

9 Responses to “Shortcut Formatting: A feature request for C# vNext!”

  1. Alex Says:

    January 10, 2008 at 4:28 am

    um… dude, that’s horrible… just do ruby strings plz…

    throw new Exception(”{a}{b}{c}”);

    surely compiler can retwire it to String.Format()… if MS needs some help, I already have C# code to do just that :)

  2. Jason Stangroome Says:

    January 10, 2008 at 4:53 am

    The String.Format in your example is a little verbose but it really gets out of hand when you start playing ball with Code Analysis rule CA1305:

    String.Format(CultureInfo.CurrentCulture, “{0}{1}{2}”, a, b, c);

    Not sure how I’d work the IFormatProvider into your shortcut notation.

  3. Eber Irigoyen Says:

    January 10, 2008 at 7:34 am

    mmm… I don’t know about this one, why add the “|” character in there?
    I ended up writing my own post

  4. ¿Qué quieres desarrollar hoy? : C# vNext wishlist: comma less argument list Says:

    January 10, 2008 at 7:40 am

    [...] vNext wishlist: comma less argument list Mitch Denny has a post about his feature request for the next version of C#he wants to have a shortcut to format strings, [...]

  5. Scott Bellware Says:

    January 10, 2008 at 9:38 pm

    Ruby’s simplicity might be a good guide:

    throw new Exception(”{a} {b} {c}”);

  6. String interpolation feature wish in C# 4.0 at Lanwin dev home Says:

    January 14, 2008 at 10:32 am

    [...] posted about his wish to integrate a shortcut for formatting in c# vnext. Let’s say that my code is going to throw and exception, I typically need to build the error [...]

  7. Mitch Denny Says:

    January 20, 2008 at 10:36 pm

    All good feedback. I think I like the parameter substitution approach the best e.g.:

    “{a}{b}{c}”

    Having said that I think that the string would need a suffix so that the compiler knew to interpret it differently, for example:

    @@”{a}{b}{c}”

    Then, you could also use standard format string syntax as well to format the parameters:

    @@”{a:c}[b}{c}”

  8. PaulStovell.NET » String.Format Extension Method Says:

    February 21, 2008 at 9:31 am

    [...] this year Mitch suggested a string formatting syntax for C# vNext. His suggestion was that string.Format could be replaced with syntax like [...]

  9. ¿Qué quieres desarrollar hoy? : Lo que quisiera ver en la siguiente version de C# Says:

    March 14, 2008 at 5:31 am

    [...] que quisiera ver en la siguiente version de C# Mitch Denny escribio sobre lo que el quisiera para la siguiente version de C# (mucha otra gente ha escrito sobre este [...]


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