C# in Depth

166 CHAPTER 6 Implementing iterators the easy wayFour lines of implementation, two of which are just braces. Just to make it clear, thatreplaces the whole of the IterationSampleIterator class. Completely. At least in thesource code… Later on we’ll see what the compiler has done behind our back, andsome of the quirks of the implementation it’s provided, but for the moment let’s lookat the source code we’ve used.The method looks like a perfectly normal one until you see the use of yieldreturn. That’s what tells the C# compiler that this isn’t a normal method but oneimplemented with an iterator block. The method is declared to return an IEnumerator,and you can only use iterator blocks to implement methods 1 that have a return type ofIEnumerable, IEnumerator, or one of the generic equivalents. The yield type of the iteratorblock is object if the declared return type of the method is a nongeneric interface,or the type argument of the generic interface otherwise. For instance, a methoddeclared to return IEnumerable would have a yield type of string.No normal return statements are allowed within iterator blocks—only yieldreturn. All yield return statements in the block have to try to return a value compatiblewith the yield type of the block. To use our previous example, you couldn’t writeyield return 1; in a method declared to return IEnumerable.NOTERestrictions on yield return—There are a few further restrictions on yieldstatements. You can’t use yield return inside a try block if it has anycatch blocks, and you can’t use either yield return or yield break(which we’ll come to shortly) in a finally block. That doesn’t mean youcan’t use try/catch or try/finally blocks inside iterators—it justrestricts what you can do in them.The big idea that you need to get your head around when it comes toiterator blocks is that although you’ve written a method that looks like itexecutes sequentially, what you’ve actually asked the compiler to do iscreate a state machine for you. This is necessary for exactly the same reasonwe had to put so much effort into implementing the iterator inC#1—the caller only wants to see one element at a time, so we need tokeep track of what we were doing when we last returned a value.In iterator blocks, the compiler creates a state machine (in the form of anested type), which remembers exactly where we were within the block and what valuesthe local variables (including parameters) had at that point. The compiler analyzesthe iterator block and creates a class that is similar to the longhandimplementation we wrote earlier, keeping all the necessary state as instance variables.Let’s think about what this state machine has to do in order to implement the iterator:Compilerdoes allthe work!■■It has to have some initial state.Whenever MoveNext is called, it has to execute code from the GetEnumeratormethod until we’re ready to provide the next value (in other words, until we hita yield return statement).1Or properties, as we’ll see later on. You can’t use an iterator block in an anonymous method, though.Licensed to Rhona Hadida