Static vs Abstract Concepts

[AbdelazizEmad1994]

Type of issue

Other (describe below)

Description

I want to raise discussion on the concepts of Static and Abstract classes.
i think that declaring a class type as Static is not entirely useful, abstract classes over arch the concept of abstraction, creating concerned methods in that class, and the derived classes implement these methods.
My proposition is to remove static keyword from classes , keeping the option of using static keyword with methods and fields.

Page URL

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/language-specification/classes#15-classes

Content source URL

https://github.com/dotnet/csharpstandard/blob/draft-v8/standard/classes.md

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

If you want to propose a language change to disallow static class, I think it belongs in https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/discussions/. The https://github.com/dotnet/csharpstandard repository is more for formally documenting how the C# language has already been designed.

I believe such a breaking change would be rejected, though. There is too much code using static class already.

[AbdelazizEmad1994]

Thank you for taking the time and effort to respond to my suggestion. i noted the large code base dependent on Static classes and Keywords, so i will not be moving forward with my suggestion until i gain a better understanding both concepts ( Abstract and Static classes ), and to get substantial exposure to the before-mentioned code base.

[KalleOlaviNiemitalo]

The static class feature is not defined in Standard ECMA-334 2nd Edition / December 2002. It was added in Standard ECMA-334 3rd Edition / June 2005.

[BillWagner]

Moving to csharplang, as this is a feature request.

As has already been commented, this is not likely because it is a breaking change that would impact a sizeable set of C# code already is use.

[AbdelazizEmad1994]

Thank you Mr Bill for taking the time to respond to my point, looking forward to delve further into C# and creating large-scale project.

[CyrusNajmabadi]

I see 350,000 cases where this is used: https://grep.app/search?q=static%20class&case=true&words=true&filter[lang][0]=C%23

We will not be removing this as this would break the entirety of the ecosystem for no good reason.

[TahirAhmadov]

How about removing inheritance from C#? 🤣

[AbdelazizEmad1994]

Thank you Mr Cyrus for responding to my point, i just wanted to point out the overlapping between the two concepts and suggest improvements, i will continue my studying and research of C# and OOP concepts to gain a better understanding of how the above mentioned concepts can integrate in large -scale projects , whether Backend or Full stack.

[HaloFour]

I think extensions are the only language feature that require declaring a class as static, otherwise the keyword exists only as a guardrail and you are free to not use it. There's no reason to remove the keyword from the language.

[AbdelazizEmad1994]

Thank you Halo Four, i was suggesting to merge overlapping concepts of Abstract and Static Classes, as i sometimes feel the presence of many keywords and concepts of similar functionality can be confusing, i will continue to further study and research the concepts of OOP and C#.

[HaloFour]

Abstract classes must be inherited, static classes cannot be inherited, so there is a pretty big difference between the two. Through inheritance you can create an instance of an abstract class and reference declared instance members. Since you can't inherit a static class there's no way to obtain an instance which is why they are not permitted to have instance members.

C# does have a lot of keywords and has evolved a lot over 20+ years. Many of those keywords, including static, were added during that evolution to fill a need or solve a problem. As the language is used by a huge audience of developers, it's very impractical to remove anything from the language without also breaking a ton of code.