[gmueckl]

You are comstructing an elaborate strawman that does nothing to work in your favor. If anything, yur essay just makes it clear that it is impossible to glean the data type from the LINQ expression itself.

Yet, any code using its result will contain implicit assumptions about that data. Therefore, in order to maintain type safety, the expected type of the return value must he stated.

That type must also be independent from whatever LINQ does internally to produce that return value. Otherwise, the LINQ providers wouldn't be as exchangeable as you claim.

[scarface74]

You also included information about “constraints” like is it a positive or negative number and string length. That wouldn’t be encoded in the type. Why would I go look up the types either way? I’m using a strongly typed language, the IDE would tell me that anyway. While I am writing code, I see a red dot showing me immediately if I’m using the type incorrectly. Any assumptions that were incorrect, I would get immediate feedback.

[gmueckl]

Not necessarily. Is Age unsigned or not? This constrains the possible range of values. In other contexts, there is a lot more information inferred by the integer type used.

[maxxxxx]

Do you actually work with C#, LINQ and generics?

[gmueckl]

Yes. I am quite familiar with them.

[maxxxxx]

Then tell me how you can model in C# a type where a property can’t be negative or a certain length.

[gmueckl]

    class Foo {
      public uint Bar { get; set; }

      private char[] _baz;

      public char[] Baz { get { return _baz;} }

      public Foo() { _baz = new char[5]; }
    }

This is cheating a bit on the array part. But the length of that char array is set in stone and cannot be changed from the outside. However, the Bar property uses a standard C# datatype.

[maxxxxx]

I honestly thing that you haven't done any real work with LINQ or you are imagining problems that don't exist. The char array is not usable as string or we have to go back to 0 terminated strings like C.

[gmueckl]

I am not imagining problems that don't exist in the application domains I work on.

If your environment is so relaxed that aspects like signedness of an integer don't matter, so be it. But then you are also far removed from a domain where software correctness is non-negotiable.

[scarface74]

And your class wouldn’t work as part of the LINQ example. EF for example wouldn’t know how to translate it.