string.Empty as a Const

[eidylon]

I'm curious if there is a specific reason, or not, as to why string.Empty is a field, and not a const?

It's always kind of bugged me that I when defining a function with optional parameters, I can't do

function myFunc(string optparam = string.Empty) { ... }

as it then yells at me that "optional parameter defaults must be compile-time constants".

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Moving discussion. Nothing in C# dictates this afaict. It's just a decision of a particular release of the runtime.

[teo-tsirpanis]

Duplicate of #60508. Quoting myself from there:

I persume you want to add this constant field to completely avoid writing "" in your code, based on the knowledge that magic strings are a bad practice. But the empty string is not a magic string per se, you could view its two consecutive double quotes as a symbol like || or &&.

[eidylon]

Exactly. Just kinda don't like having hard-coded values in my code if I can help it.
Just like using Environment.NewLine instead of "\n".

[CyrusNajmabadi]

Exactly. Just kinda don't like having hard-coded values in my code if I can help it.

You can make your own const value that is set to the empty string and then just refer to that wherever you want a name instead of a literal.