A Blatant Programming Question
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"save you from creating a throwaway class" ^^This Ask yourself how many times you've (mis-)used the
outparam, to have method "return" two values. Sometimes you need two values back, and creating a class/struct for just that one method to be able to return the two values is.. annoying (and clutters the code) Using a Tuple instead is the "clean" way of doing this (and it can be expanded to more than just two objects)The 'clean' way is not so clean because C# (and VB) do not have any language constructs to handle them. A function that would return a tuple will require some 'dirty' code to untangle the tuple. I thing tuples were added to .Net to support F#, which does make language constructs to deal with them. Until C# adds similar constructs, I don't see using them.
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Not sure if you actually got an answer here, but the 20 or so results I scanned seemed hopelessly misguided. Tuples are used enormously in functional programming and are extremely useful in LINQ. With LINQ queries, you may have an object of type person with Name, Age, Gender, etc. Now if you execute "from Persons where age > 20 select Age, Gender", what is the type of the result: answer a tuple type with the first item an integer and the 2nd an enum type. This is where they are useful. They avoid having to litter your code with classes that add no meaningful information and are pure data values. They are commonly useful as return types, e.g. a tuple where the first item indicates if the 2nd is applicable. Many more usages exist.
Cool! That makes sense to me! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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One of the best things tuples do is they allow you to return multiple values from a function instead of just one value as was the case in C# before C# 4.0.
I haven't needed to do that often, but I can see the value of this for a number of applications. Thanks! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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:laugh: Only the items could be anything, seems very much to resemble a list of different objects, witch you could send around without createing a class. I cant think of a use. WPF and binding seem to make them unnessecary, but what do I know... Im sure that someone will tell you that the planets existens depended on this class...
Probably a direct mapping to the javascript array which can take just about anything.
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Cool! That makes sense to me! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Glad it was helpful.
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Not really... ;P There's a discussion going on in the C# forum about Tuples, and I'm curious what one would use them for. From browsing VS2010 Help, it appears to me that this is a way to make vectors of mixed types which, if used as a type for an Array, could allow mixed arrays. Is this correct? And what would be an example of using such a beast? Wouldn't a dataset be more efficient? Enquiring minds want to know, as they say at the checkout counter. :)
Will Rogers never met me.
Hi Roger, Just happened upon this thread (been a few days since I was last at CP on this computer). Turples are used heavily in MDX (Multi dimensional Expressions, for Multi Dimensional databases such as SSAS) where they create a subset of data on the fly. The data is not entirely known (the multi dimensional database does know the meta data of the database) until the user selects the data. I would guess that the class was added to aid in building MDX query interfaces.
Common sense is admitting there is cause and effect and that you can exert some control over what you understand.
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The 'clean' way is not so clean because C# (and VB) do not have any language constructs to handle them. A function that would return a tuple will require some 'dirty' code to untangle the tuple. I thing tuples were added to .Net to support F#, which does make language constructs to deal with them. Until C# adds similar constructs, I don't see using them.
The "clean" was in ""'s - As it was compared to the misuse of the
outparam. Strictly speaking I agree it's not clean, and one ought to create a new class/struct. But... I also don't like to clutter my code with tiny helper classes with no other functionality than storing a few values, so I can return it from a method call. Pest or cholera... But either way, I still think it's "cleaner" (can we agree on that :cool:) than misusing theoutparameter for this purpose (something I've also done... :-O ) -
Not really... ;P There's a discussion going on in the C# forum about Tuples, and I'm curious what one would use them for. From browsing VS2010 Help, it appears to me that this is a way to make vectors of mixed types which, if used as a type for an Array, could allow mixed arrays. Is this correct? And what would be an example of using such a beast? Wouldn't a dataset be more efficient? Enquiring minds want to know, as they say at the checkout counter. :)
Will Rogers never met me.
There are a lot of uses for tuples in math, e. g. in group theory. They have been used in these areas for much longer than computers exist. Most of the time, the elements of a tuple in math are of a radically different kind. E. g. when you define an algebraic group, you build a tuple out of the basic set of numbers that your elements are based on (e. g. real numbers, complex numbers, integers, or something more exotic such as functions), and the rules for performing operations on your elements, such as addition, multiplication, whether these operations are associative or commutative, etc.. While I can imagine some mathematician rejoices at the ability to model such constructs in software directly, IMHO a simple class would serve the same purpose. Only better.
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There are a lot of uses for tuples in math, e. g. in group theory. They have been used in these areas for much longer than computers exist. Most of the time, the elements of a tuple in math are of a radically different kind. E. g. when you define an algebraic group, you build a tuple out of the basic set of numbers that your elements are based on (e. g. real numbers, complex numbers, integers, or something more exotic such as functions), and the rules for performing operations on your elements, such as addition, multiplication, whether these operations are associative or commutative, etc.. While I can imagine some mathematician rejoices at the ability to model such constructs in software directly, IMHO a simple class would serve the same purpose. Only better.
Now that you mention it, I've probably used tuples many times. After all, a state variable matrix of a control system often contains very different quantities in a state vector. That is a sort of tuple, even though the actual values are nearly always real or complex numbers.
Will Rogers never met me.
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Now that you mention it, I've probably used tuples many times. After all, a state variable matrix of a control system often contains very different quantities in a state vector. That is a sort of tuple, even though the actual values are nearly always real or complex numbers.
Will Rogers never met me.
Actually, in the meantime I did conceive one reasonable use-case for tuples: functions that return multiple values. E. g. when you cut a curve with a surface, you may be interested not only in the resulting 3d-point, but also the parameters used to generate that point on the curve and the surface (assuming they are defined as parametric functions). There may also be no or multiple cut points, and various border cases that you may want to indicate in some way.