You’ve seen in several places so far in this book that methods can return a type, or they can return nothing at all if the return type is void
. You’ve mostly used void
methods up until now, specifically Main( )
, although WriteLine( )
is a void method as well. The constructors you’ve worked with do return a value—they return an instance of the class.
What you may not know is that you can use a method call in place of an object, if the method returns the appropriate type. For example, suppose you have a class Multiplier
, such as this:
public class Multiplier { public int Multiply(int firstOperand, int secondOperand) { return firstOperand * secondOperand; } }
You can call that Multiply( )
method anyplace you’d expect an int
, like this:
int x = 4; int y = 10; Multiplier myMultiplier = new Multiplier( ); int result = myMultiplier.Multiply(x, y);
Here, you’re assigning the return value of the Multiply( )
method to an int
, which works fine, because the return type of the Multiply( )
method is int
. You can do the same with any of the intrinsic types, or with classes you create.