A delegate is a form of type-safe function pointer used in the .NET Framework. Delegates are used to implement callbacks and event listeners. In computer science, a programming language is type safe when the language does not permit the programmer to treat a value as a type to which it does not belong. ... A function pointer is a type of pointer in the C and C++ programming languages. ... The Microsoft . ... In computer science, a callback is executable code that is passed as a parameter to other code. ... In computer programming, event listener is one of design patterns that is to distribute data to objects that volunteer for it, but you dont want to maintain a central list of where it should go, especially if it changes over the life of a running program. ...

Implementation

Although internal implentations may vary, delegate instances can be thought of as a linked list of both method pointers, allowing multiple delegates to be combined into a single object. As a result, delegates can support multiple event listeners. When invoking a delegate, each method in the list is called. ... In strictly mathematical branches of computer science the term object is used in a purely mathematical sense to refer to any thing. While this interpretation is useful in the discussion of abstract theory, it is not concrete enough to serve as a primitive datatype in the discussion of more concrete... In computer science, a linked list is one of the fundamental data structures used in computer programming. ... Used mainly in object-oriented programming, the term method refers to a piece of code that is exclusively associated either with a class (called class methods, static methods, or factory methods) or with an object (called instance methods). ... It has been suggested that Software pointer be merged into this article or section. ...

See also

• Delegation (programming)
• Observer pattern
• Event-driven programming