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Comment by candl | Hacker News Reader

I wish C# had standalone functions without needing to wrap them in classes.

Using static lets you ape that now. You still need to declare a static class, but you don't need to include the class name when calling it if you important the class via "using static".

It'd never pass code review on Hacker News but the classic C# hack for that is just to make a class called Global or whatever and throw your must-be-everywhere functions in there.

I think most applications in C# end up with a Utilities class/library.

c++ namespaces are so great for this. Don't know why theyre not available in most languages.

C# does have namespaces as well.

Too bad the standard library didn't get the memo and shoved everything into a single namespace :-)

I don't think any .NET language can do that - ie in F# every function has to be wrapped up in a module.

> I don't think any .NET language can do that

Although the CLR does allow for them.

Global functions can be emulated:

    public static GlobalFuncs
    {
        public string Greet(string x) => $"Hello, {x}";
    }

Elsewhere:

    using static GlobalFuncs;

    public void Test();
    {
        Greet("HN");  // "Hello, HN"
    }

This isn't feature that the CLR knows. It is just syntactic sugar from the C# compiler; As it will prepend GlobalFuncs to the Greet method.

Sorry, I didn't mean to confuse the issue. The CLR can do global functions. But no .NET language currently supports it. The example I gave was just a way of achieving visually the effect of global functions (which I assumed was the major issue of the OP, because there's no other cost to using static methods than having the qualify them with the type name).

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