why can we declare delegates outside a class? Is it not against OOP concept?

Question

According to oops fundamentels, everything has to be inside a class. Then why are we allowed to create delegates outside a class?

Answer 1

First off, your idea of what is an OOP "fundamental" is not a fundamental. The inventor of the term "object oriented", Alan Kay, famously said:

I made up the term 'object-oriented', and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind.

Certainly the idea that lexically "everything goes inside a class" is not a fundamental principle of OOP. It's not even clear to me that the idea of a "class" is fundamental to object-oriented programming; the "class-based inheritance" pattern is just one way of embedding into a language support for concepts such as message passing, data abstraction and implementation sharing.

Second, your implication that C# the language designers are trying to make a language that conforms to "fundamentals" of OOP is putting the cart before the horse. Rather, we want to make a language that supports large, diverse teams working together on versionable, independent, interacting software components on our platforms. OOP just happens to be a great way to do that, so that's what we're doing.

We are certainly not trying to make a "pure" OOP language by any means. We'll take ideas from any paradigm if they support real-world customer-benefitting scenarios. There are ideas in C# taken from OOP, from procedural programming, from functional programming, from dynamic languages, and so on.

Third, your question is logically inconsistent. You ask why you can define a delegate outside a class. But a delegate is a class. A delegate is a very special class; it is always sealed, it always inherits from System.MulticastDelegate, and it always has the same members. But it is a class. We give it special syntax to call out that it is a very special kind of class. It makes sense to be able to define a delegate class outside of a class.

Fourth, the ultimate reason why it is legal to put a delegate outside a class is because it is highly convenient to do so. What is the class that you think Func<T> or EventHandler should go inside? Would that class be "OOP"? According to conventional "OOP" wisdom, a class should represent a concept by associating operations with data; what conceptual class of things does your proposed parent class of Func<T> represent, and what are the operations and data on it?

There is no such sensible outer class, and there are no operations or data associated with the "outer class" of Func<T>. So why force the user to define a useless outer class, just to be conformant with someone's mistaken idea of what "OOP" means?

Answer 2

Actually Delegates are a type ( class). It is just a syntactic sugar, if you may, when you declare a delegate type

public delegate int PerformCalculation(int x, int y);

A delegate is a type that safely encapsulates a method. Delegate types are derived from the Delegate class in the .NET Framework.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173172%28v=vs.80%29.aspx

So when you are declaring a delegate outside a class, you are actually creating a new type / class. You then create a delegate instance within a class.

With that said, like @Mehrdad excellently points out, everything has to be inside a class is not a requirement for OOP.