I was just explaining delegates and lambdas to a friend and thought that I'd write up an example for him.
Here is an IEnumerable<> that we want to interrogate to get all values greater than or equal to 60:
int[] scores = { 45, 55, 59, 65, 66, 67, 68 };
Here is how we could do it using a delegate. We declare a Func<T, TResult> type which is the same as a pointer to a function in C. In our following LINQ statement we pass that function pointer (delegate) as the "predicate" in the Where "clause." The Where() extension method will be passing in each int one at a time and expect a bool true/false result back. That's why we declared the delegate as a Func<int, bool>, the int is what we're passing in and the bool is the return type.
Func<int, bool> predicate = delegate(int score) { return score >= 60; };
IEnumerable<int> passingScores1 = scores.Where(predicate);
LINQ makes the above syntax much easier for us. In the parameter to the Where() extension method we can declare the body of the function so long as it adheres to the prototype of int parameter and bool return.
IEnumerable<int> passingScores2 = scores.Where((int score) => score >= 60);
The compiler can infer the type that's being passed in as the parameter so we can drop the (int score) and replace it with score if you want even more brevity.
IEnumerable<int> passingScores3 = scores.Where(score => score >= 60);
Func<> has 5 overloads:
Func<TResult>
Func<T, TResult>
Func<T1, T2, TResult>
Func<T1, T2, T3, TResult>
Func<T1, T2, T3, T4, TResult>
In best coding practices, what are the maximum number of parameters a function should have? Well the designers of the Func<> delegate believe that it's four and I don't disagree with them. I am guilty of using more than four but that's mostly out of laziness of writing and populating a class to pass instead of the parameters.
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