C# Language Specification

Dynamic binding

The purpose of dynamic binding is to allow C# programs to interact with dynamic objects, i.e. objects that do not follow the normal rules of the C# type system. Dynamic objects may be objects from other programming languages with different types systems, or they may be objects that are programmatically setup to implement their own binding semantics for different operations.

The mechanism by which a dynamic object implements its own semantics is implementation defined. A given interface – again implementation defined – is implemented by dynamic objects to signal to the C# run-time that they have special semantics. Thus, whenever operations on a dynamic object are dynamically bound, their own binding semantics, rather than those of C# as specified in this document, take over.

While the purpose of dynamic binding is to allow interoperation with dynamic objects, C# allows dynamic binding on all objects, whether they are dynamic or not. This allows for a smoother integration of dynamic objects, as the results of operations on them may not themselves be dynamic objects, but are still of a type unknown to the programmer at compile-time. Also dynamic binding can help eliminate error-prone reflection-based code even when no objects involved are dynamic objects.

The following sections describe for each construct in the language exactly when dynamic binding is applied, what compile time checking – if any – is applied, and what the compile-time result and expression classification is.

3. Types of constituent expressions

When an operation is statically bound, the type of a constituent expression (e.g. a receiver, and argument, an index or an operand) is always considered to be the compile-time type of that expression.

When an operation is dynamically bound, the type of a constituent expression is determined in different ways depending on the compile-time type of the constituent expression:

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  A constituent expression of compile-time type dynamic is considered to have the type of the actual value that the expression evaluates to at runtime
  
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  A constituent expression whose compile-time type is a type parameter is considered to have the type which the type parameter is bound to at runtime
  
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  Otherwise the constituent expression is considered to have its compile-time type.
  

3.