Today I’ve been reviewing the ECMA-334 C# specification, and in particular the section about class instance constructors.

I was struck by this piece in a clause about default constructors:

If a class contains no instance constructor declarations, a default instance constructor is automatically provided. That default constructor simply invokes the parameterless constructor of the direct base class.

I believe this to be incorrect, and indeed it is, as shown here (in C# 6 code for brevity, despite this being the C# 5 spec that I’m reviewing; that’s irrelevant in this case):

using System;

class Base
{
    public int Foo { get; }

    public Base(int foo = 5)
    {
        Foo = foo;
    }
}

class Derived : Base
{    
}

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        var d = new Derived();
        Console.WriteLine(d.Foo); // Prints 5
    }    
}

Here the default constructor in Derived clearly doesn’t execute a parameterless constructor in Base because there is no parameterless constructor in Base. Instead, it executes the parameterized constructor, providing the default argument value.

So, I considered whether we could reword the standard to something like:

If a class contains no instance constructor declarations, a default instance constructor is automatically provided. That default constructor simply invokes a constructor of the direct base class as if the default constructor contained a constructor initializer of base().

But is that always the case? It turns out it’s not – at least not in Roslyn. There are more interesting optional parameters we can use than just int foo = 5. Let’s have a look:

using System;
using System.Runtime.CompilerServices;

class Base
{
    public string Origin { get; }

    public Base([CallerMemberName] string name = "Unspecified",
                [CallerFilePath] string source = "Unspecified",                
                [CallerLineNumber] int line = -1)
    {
        Origin = $"{name} - {source}:{line}";
    }
}

class Derived1 : Base {}
class Derived2 : Base
{
    public Derived2() {}
}
class Derived3 : Base
{
    public Derived3() : base() {}
}

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        Console.WriteLine(new Derived1().Origin);
        Console.WriteLine(new Derived2().Origin);
        Console.WriteLine(new Derived3().Origin);
    }    
}

The result is:

Unspecified - Unspecified:-1
Unspecified - Unspecified:-1
.ctor - c:\Users\Jon\Test\Test.cs:23

When base() is explicitly specified, that source location is treated as the “caller” for caller member info attributes. When it’s implicit (including when there’s a default constructor), no source location is made available to the Base constructor.

This is somewhat compiler-specific – and I can imagine different results where the default constructor could specify a name but not source file or line number, and the declared constructor with an implicit call could specify the name and source file but no line number.

I would never suggest using this little tidbit of Roslyn implementation trivia, but it’s fun nonetheless…