Types

Toolshed’s type system is, for the most part that of C#’s. Toolshed adds some additional type rules for the convenience of both users and developers.

For users

All values are a list of length 1 (T -> IEnumerable<T>)

Toolshed will automatically cast a lone value into a list containing only that value, if necessary. This lets you apply enumerable only commands to single values if necessary.

Any collection of T is an IEnumerable<T>

This isn’t technically toolshed specific, but it’s useful to know that one can use a List<T>, HashSet<T>, Dictionary<K,V>, etc, as the input to any command taking an enumerable.

IEnumerable<T> is boxed into List<T> on assignment.

When assigning an enumerable to a variable, Toolshed will automatically coerce it into a list to fully evaluate it and allow you to reuse it. Within C#, using an IEnumerable<T> more than once is disallowed, hence this coersion.

For developers

Co-variance and Contra-variance limitations.

Toolshed will refuse to do complex assignability checks for types with more than one co-variant or contra-variant argument, as to avoid combinatorial explosion from searching all possible types to use.

IAsType<T> and implicit casting.

Toolshed will, for any type implementing IAsType<T>, consider T to be a valid implicit cast for that type. For example, if Foo : IAsType<Bar>, Toolshed will use the IAsType implementation to obtain Bar from Foo if it’d allow it to successfully typecheck a command run.