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I have portable class library with ReflectionHelper class containing a handful set of convenient methods to perform reflection related operations.

I marked many of these methods as pure but later in another peace of code I noticed a warning that GetTypeInfo() is not pure itself. I undersand that for new reflection api calling GetTypeInfo() results in loading the assembly, containing the type and the absense of this assembly leads to exception.

And now I'm confused with the definition of purity from PureAttribute documentation at MSDN:

Indicates that a type or method is pure, that is, it does not make any visible state changes.

What change can be dubbed as visible? Do assembly loading falls under this category?

Pavel Voronin
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1 Answers1

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It basically means the following:

This method is not supposed to change the state of your program in such a way that it works differently if this method is not called.

Background:
With Code Contracts you have the option to remove the contracts in the Release build. But that obviously shouldn't change the behavior of the program.

Your method is pure in this regard. You can remove this call and the outcome of your program doesn't change.

Daniel Hilgarth
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