Interfaces — What's the point?

Asked 2011-07-23T18:56:53.567

349

The reason for interfaces truly eludes me. From what I understand, it is kind of a work around for the non-existent multi-inheritance which doesn't exist in C# (or so I was told).

All I see is, you predefine some members and functions, which then have to be re-defined in the class again. Thus making the interface redundant. It just feels like syntactic… well, junk to me (Please no offense meant. Junk as in useless stuff).

In the example given below taken from a different C# interfaces thread on stack overflow, I would just create a base class called Pizza instead of an interface.

easy example (taken from a different stack overflow contribution)

public interface IPizza
{
    public void Order();
}

public class PepperoniPizza : IPizza
{
    public void Order()
    {
        //Order Pepperoni pizza
    }
}

public class HawaiiPizza : IPizza
{
    public void Order()
    {
        //Order HawaiiPizza
    }
}

c# .net interface

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3 Answers

Interfaces are for applying connection between different classes. for example, you have a class for car and a tree;

public class Car { ... }

public class Tree { ... }

you want to add a burnable functionality for both classes. But each class have their own ways to burn. so you simply make;

public class Car : IBurnable
{
public void Burn() { ... }
}

public class Tree : IBurnable
{
public void Burn() { ... }
}

answered 2011-07-23T19:40:59.057

I'm surprised that not many posts contain the one most important reason for an interface: Design Patterns. It's the bigger picture into using contracts, and although it's a syntax decoration to machine code (to be honest, the compiler probably just ignores them), abstraction and interfaces are pivotal for OOP, human understanding, and complex system architectures.

Let's expand the pizza analogy to say a full fledge 3 course meal. We'll still have the core Prepare() interface for all our food categories, but we'd also have abstract declarations for course selections (starter, main, dessert), and differing properties for food types (savoury/sweet, vegetarian/non-vegetarian, gluten free etc).

Based on these specifications, we could implement the Abstract Factory pattern to conceptualise the whole process, but use interfaces to ensure that only the foundations were concrete. Everything else could become flexible or encourage polymorphism, yet maintain encapsulation between the different classes of Course that implement the ICourse interface.

If I had more time, I'd like to draw up a full example of this, or someone can extend this for me, but in summary, a C# interface would be the best tool in designing this type of system.

answered 2013-03-21T11:57:39.260

The simplest way to think about interfaces is to recognize what inheritance means. If class CC inherits class C, it means both that:

Class CC can use any public or protected members of class C as though they were its own, and thus only needs to implement things which do not exist in the parent class.
A reference to a CC can be passed or assigned to a routine or variable that expects a reference to a C.

Those two function of inheritance are in some sense independent; although inheritance applies both simultaneously, it is also possible to apply the second without the first. This is useful because allowing an object to inherit members from two or more unrelated classes is much more complicated than allowing one type of thing to be substitutable for multiple types.

An interface is somewhat like an abstract base class, but with a key difference: an object which inherits a base class cannot inherit any other class. By contrast, an object may implement an interface without affecting its ability to inherit any desired class or implement any other interfaces.

One nice feature of this (underutilized in the .net framework, IMHO) is that they make it possible to indicate declaratively the things an object can do. Some objects, for example, will want data-source object from which they can retrieve things by index (as is possible with a List), but they won't need to store anything there. Other routines will need a data-depository object where they can store things not by index (as with Collection.Add), but they won't need to read anything back. Some data types will allow access by index, but won't allow writing; others will allow writing, but won't allow access by index. Some, of course, will allow both.

If ReadableByIndex and Appendable were unrelated base classes, it would be impossible to define a type which could be passed both to things expecting a ReadableByIndex and things expecting an Appendable. One could tr

answered 2011-07-24T19:28:15.673

Interfaces — What's the point?

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