Proposal: Allow "this" as the constructor name

[MV10]

Some languages use the this keyword as the name of the constructor. It seems sensible to me so I thought I'd float the suggestion. I suppose it also implies ~this for finalizers.

public class Foo
{
    public this(string bar) { ... }
}

While building and maintaining DI-aware libraries, I often find myself cutting-and-pasting constructors and this change would save a (small) step having to rename the constructor to match the new class.

[HaloFour]

A this member already means something different in C#, defining an indexer. I think it would be confusing to reuse it to also mean a constructor.

[MV10]

Ah, great point. Closing.

[jnm2]

I often find myself cutting-and-pasting constructors and this change would save a (small) step having to rename the constructor to match the new class.

💡 What about copying and pasting only the constructor parameter list, and then using a code action to generate fields from the parameter list?

[TruePluto]

may be using ctor instead of this

public class Foo
{
        public ctor(string bar){....}
        public ctor(string bar, string bar2) :this(bar){...}
        public ctor():base(){...}
}

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Note: there is nothing actually syntactically wrong with allowing 'this' as the constructor name. yes, it shares a prefix with indexers. but they have very different code after the 'this' keyword. 'this' works well for me in both situations. One explains how to construct a new 'this', and one explains how you could index as instance of 'this'.

[MV10]

@TruePluto I've had the same thought ... but they try to avoid adding new keywords. (That was explained to me once when I asked about the weird way that using has two wildly different meanings.)

@CyrusNajmabadi That's a good point. Indexers have a return-type, so without a type it could indicate the constructor.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

@CyrusNajmabadi That's a good point. Indexers have a return-type, so without a type it could indicate the constructor.

Which is exactly the same grammatical difference between constructors and methods today :) So it makes a bunch of sense.

[GeirGrusom]

new