Why is typeof needed?

Question

Something I\'ve been thinking about from time to time: Why is the typeof operator needed in C#? Doesn\'t the compiler know that public class Animal is a type ju

Answer 1

Not having typeof does cause ambiguity:

class foo
{
    public static string ToString()
    {
        return "Static";
    }
}
public class Program
{
    private static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine(foo.ToString());
        Console.WriteLine(typeof(foo).ToString());
    }
}

foo and typeof(foo) are not referring to the same thing, and forcing the compiler to pretend they are is a bad idea, even if we ignore this ambiguity.