Generics C# 2.0

I'm not an experienced programmer when it comes to generics. I thought that I was. However, the more interested I get in programming languages, the more I tend to look at other languages. Now I realize C# 2 is limited.

Disclaimer: Understand that I limit my discussion to C# 2 as reference, I haven’t checked out C# 3 fully just yet, so I will not even bother stating anything about it. Also realize that this particular subject isn't my primary. Johan (blog in Swedish http://hoomla.blogspot.com/), a friend of mine introduced me to the mysterious world of questioning why languages look the way they look. I find myself thinking in other patterns now days, that’s all. So I have some thoughts that I want to put down.

You all know how List<> work, you declare your List<> and give it a type to adopt. Then we have Dictionary<,> where you define two types that you want the class to adopt. Both are good, you can do great stuff with these things. But what if you could declare something like an Array<Tn> where n is a variable number of T’s. Example, I want an Array that holds two strings and a integer, then I would do this Array<string, string, int>. Or if I wanted an Array with one string, one integer and MyType, then I would declare it Array<string, int, MyType>.

As far as I understand, some languages have support for this, it’s called Tuples. F# has Tuples, I haven’t investigated if it is what I think it is just yet. So how would we go about using this generic generics then? What would a foreach look like? I don’t know, could we use foreach or should we need to use more functional programming?

However, generics aren’t limited to arrays or lists. That’s just the most obvious reason to use them. FPSharp is a great example of what you can do with generics (http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpsharp). Credit goes to Johan who find and investigate tons of these things every day.