posted by Stilgar

posted by felix9

posted by dentaku

posted by cwilliams

posted by gduncan411

posted by briankel

posted by littleguru

The slides were presented at DDD Belfast early in October. The inspiration for the title came from a talk by Leon Bambrick. The slide that got the focus in the Channel 9 video above was titled Light Syntax and was part of the Demos section, added as a reference for attendees.

The demo was primarily intended to help C# developers understand how F# maps to C#.

That said the comparison of number of lines of code is interesting. As discussed in the Channel 9 video above if we don't need the class to be immutable then C# Auto-Implemented Properties could be employed, however you'd still probably want a constructor and comments in your C# code, i.e.:

public class Person
{
    public Person(string name, int age)
    {
        Name = name;
        Age = age;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Full name
    /// </summary>
    public string Name { get; private set; }
    
    /// <summary>
    /// Age in years
    /// </summary>
    public int Age { get; private set; }
}

F# class types let you define a primary constructor in the parameter list that follows the type name, and by default F# triple-slash comments define summary blocks without the need for XML tags

type Person (name:string, age:int) =
    
    /// Full name
    member person.Name = name

    /// Age in years
    member person.Age = age

If we forgo the comments, this can be brought down to 1 line with an F# record:

type Person = { Name:string; Age:int }

The F# record above will automatically generate a constructor and properties for use from other .Net languages including C#; it is also immutable.

Further reading:

A look at F# from C#'s corner: http://www.servicestack.net/mythz_blog/?p=765

From C# to F#: a developer's perspective: http://www.developerfusion.com/article/122233/from-f-to-c-a-developers-perspective/

C# Light Syntax: http://trelford.com/blog/post/LighterCSharp.aspx

More discussion on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/l294s/f_for_c_developers/

posted by floodphil