Representing Typed N-tuples in C#

Question

List<struct {string, string, double} > L = new List<struct {string, string, double}>;
L.Add({"hi", "mom", 5.0});

What is the nicest way to get this functionality in C#? I want to define a strongly-typed tuple on the fly (for use in a local function), save a bunch of them in a list, do some processing and return a result, never to touch the list again.

I don't actually care about the strong typing, but a List of vars doesn't work. Do I want a list of objects? Is that the closest I can get?

Defining structs or classes for temporary data structures seems verbose and pedantic to me.

Answer 1

The best way to represent this in C# is to use the Tuple type

var l = new List<Tuple<string, string, double>>();
l.Add(Tuple.Create("hi", "mom", 42.0));

There's no explicit language support for tuples but as you can see the API isn't too wordy

Answer 2

var arr = new[] { Tuple.Create("hi","mom", 5.0) };

is the easiest; this is actually an array, but a list is easy enough too - perhaps .ToList() if you feel lazy.

Personally, in this scenario I'd use an anon-type:

var arr = new[] { new { Text = "hi", Name = "mom", Value = 5.0 } };

Very similar, except the member-names are more meaningful.