Why can I create a class named “var”?

Question

Isn\'t var a keyword in C#? But why can I do this:

public class var { }

public class main
{
    public static void main(string[] args)
    {
           


        

Answer 1

Another way of looking at this: "var" as a keyword was not in the first versions of C# (unlike "int" and "true"), so you might have written some code then which had a class called "var". This was perfectly fine and legal. Then later on when "var" was added to the language, the designers were so kind as to make it a keyword only in certain contexts, so your existing var class would still work.

This is one of the real challenges of language design - how to add new features without breaking existing code, and without making the new features cumbersome to use.