Why can’t I cast from a List to List?

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The reason this is not legal is because it is not safe. Suppose it were legal:

List<Giraffe> giraffes = new List<Giraffe>();
List<Animal> animals = giraffes; // this is not legal; suppose it were.
animals.Add(new Tiger());  // it is always legal to put a tiger in a list of animals

But “animals” is actually a list of giraffes; you can’t put a tiger in a list of giraffes.

In C# this is, unfortunately, legal with arrays of reference type:

Giraffe[] giraffes = new Giraffe[10];
Animal[] animals = giraffes; // legal! But dangerous because...
animals[0] = new Tiger(); // ...this fails at runtime!

In C# 4 this is legal on IEnumerable but not IList:

List<Giraffe> giraffes = new List<Giraffe>();
IEnumerable<Animal> animals = giraffes; // Legal in C# 4
foreach(Animal animal in animals) { } // Every giraffe is an animal, so this is safe

It is safe because IEnumerable<T> does not expose any method that takes in a T.

To solve your problem you can:

  • Create a new list of objects out of the old list.
  • Make the method take an object[] rather than a List<object>, and use unsafe array covariance.
  • Make the method generic, so it takes a List<T>
  • Make the method take IEnumerable
  • Make the method take IEnumerable<object> and use C# 4.

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