Will a future version of .NET support tuples in C#?

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I’ve just read this article from the MSDN Magazine: Building Tuple

Here are excerpts:

The upcoming 4.0 release of Microsoft
.NET Framework introduces a new type
called System.Tuple. System.Tuple is a
fixed-size collection of
heterogeneously typed data.
 
 

 

Like an array, a tuple has a fixed
size that can’t be changed once it has
been created. Unlike an array, each
element in a tuple may be a different
type, and a tuple is able to guarantee
strong typing for each element.

 

There is already one example of a
tuple floating around the Microsoft
.NET Framework, in the
System.Collections.Generic namespace:
KeyValuePair. While KeyValuePair can be thought of as the same
as Tuple, since they are both
types that hold two things,
KeyValuePair feels different from
Tuple because it evokes a relationship
between the two values it stores (and
with good reason, as it supports the
Dictionary class).

Furthermore, tuples can be arbitrarily
sized, whereas KeyValuePair holds only
two things: a key and a value.

While some languages like F# have special syntax for tuples, you can use the new common tuple type from any language. Revisiting the first example, we can see that while useful, tuples can be overly verbose in languages without syntax for a tuple:

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        Tuple<string, int> t = new Tuple<string, int>("Hello", 4);
        PrintStringAndInt(t.Item1, t.Item2);
    }
    static void PrintStringAndInt(string s, int i) {
        Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", s, i);
    }
}

Using the var keyword from C# 3.0, we can remove the type signature on the tuple variable, which allows for somewhat more readable code.

var t = new Tuple<string, int>("Hello", 4);

We’ve also added some factory methods to a static Tuple class which makes it easier to build tuples in a language that supports type inference, like C#.

var t = Tuple.Create("Hello", 4);

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