Why are field initializers of a derived class are executed before base classes's initializers

Question

constructors are executed in the order from top to bottom I.E. base\'s first followed by derived one. This arangement is based on an important OOP assurance that an object (

Answer 1

Field Initializers are not meant to be a replacement for constructors.

As per MSDN documentation all field initializers are executed before constructors. However a restriction on the Field Initializer is that they cannot refer to other instance fields. ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms173118(v=vs.80).aspx)

The restriction is due to the fact that there is no way to identify the right order and the dependencies to execute the Field Initializers at a compiler level.

You would have to write a default constructor to achieve what you want. You could possibly try with a static field, however; it is a bad practice and might not even suit your design.

---

Edit for clarifying question asked in comment:

As far as a derived class is concerned, the base class fields look the same whether they are initialized through the initializer or the constructor. This information cannot be supplied to the child classes as this would mean exposing the implementation of the base class (which is strictly private to the base class).

This implies that the derived class Initializer has no way to figure out if all the base class fields have been initialized before accessing them. Hence the behavior is not allowed.