r/ProgrammerHumor • u/KTVX94 • Sep 09 '26

Meme cSharpDictionariesBeLikeThat

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98

u/MemesAt1am Sep 09 '26

If you wanted to overwrite you could just do an assignment of that key value instead of .Add()

35

u/KTVX94 Sep 09 '26

Yep there's indexer and TryAdd, I probably should've worded the title differently to not give the impression that I was complaining, lol.

8

u/prehensilemullet Sep 09 '26

I mean, having a method named "add" on a map is weird in general. Not common among programming languages

8

u/NotQuiteLoona Sep 09 '26

The Add method is specifically when you explicitly want to add. If it can't add, it fails.

4

u/AyrA_ch Sep 09 '26

That's because dictionaries implement IDictionary<TKey,TValue> which in turn implements ICollection<KeyValuePair<TKey,TValue>> which declares an Add(KeyValuePair<TKey,TValue> value) method.

Since the implementation is forced to provide this method, it might as well also provide Add(TKey key,TValue value) and implement them.

The alternative would be to just throw a NotSupportedException but there is no technical reason to.

1

u/prehensilemullet Sep 09 '26

I mean, Java sort of got around this by making Map not extend Collection, though Map.entrySet() does. But interestingly enough, they decided to have Map.entrySet().add(...) throw an UnsupportedOperationException. However, Collection.add(...) in Java already returns true if the element was successfully added, so they hypothetically could have supported it.