Using Roslyn project I've implemented F# language feature which I am missing in c# - short collections initialization. In F# it is possible to initialize list in a following way:
let myList = [1;2;3]
which is in my opinion much more convenient in comparing to C# construct:
var myList = new List
So I decided to introduce following declaration for C#:
var myList = [<1>]
In order to extend C# with this construct we have to implement two important steps:
1) Modify syntax tree created by Roslyn, replacing [<expr1...exprN>
2) Infer type parameter for a list, and replace _ with this type.
SyntaxTree is a read-only construct and in fact is an extended AST. Roslyn API allows you to get updated instance of it using Visitor design pattern, so by overriding specific method of base SyntaxRewriter class you can modify this specific node of the SyntaxTree. In our case we have to override VisitElementAccessExpression method because our declaration is in fact indexer expression in C# for parser. In this override we need to define whether this expression is usual VisitElementAccessExpression or it is our list declaration. We use knowledge that first argument is a LessThenExpression and the last one is a GreaterThenExpression. So extraction will be following:
After we got expressions which correspond to elements of our list, we have to infer type parameter for our list. I used simple rule for that - take type of the first expression so C# compiler will make all dirty work of checking types of remaining elements. For getting type of the first element in the list I used Roslyn's semantics services. Great thing there that I don't need to get all my current code compilable at this moment - otherwise it will not be simply possible. After type is extracted we form and return updated list initialization node:
After we modified our syntax tree, the only thing we need is to build demo exe file from it: Next step could possibly be integrating our new C# compiler into Visual Studio which can be performed by modifying BuildAction or CustomTool property for code.txt file in the solution explorer.
That is all, full project is on github.