Things I Learned Reading The C# Specifications - Part 1

After reading Jon Skeet’s excellent C# in Depth - again (3rd edition - to be published soon) I’ve decided to try and actually read the C# language specification…

Being a sensible kind of guy I’ve decided to purchase the annotated version which only cover topics up to .NET 4 – but has priceless comments from several C# gurus.

After I’ve read a few pages I was amazed to learn that a few things I knew to be true were completely wrong and so I’ve decided to write a list of new things I’ve learnt while reading this book.

Below you’ll find a short list of new things I learnt from reading the 1st chapter:

Not all value types are saved on the stack

Many developers believe that reference types are stored on the heap while value types are always  stored on the stack – this is not entirely true.

First it’s more of an implementation detail of the actual runtime and not a language requirement but more importantly it’s not possible – consider a class (a.k.a reference type) which has a integer member (a.k.a value type),  the class is stored on the heap and so are it’s members including the value type since its data is copied “by-value”.

class MyClass

{

    // stored in heap

    int a = 5;  

}

For more information read Eric Lippert’s post on the subject – he should know.

What the hell is “protected internal”

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