What exactly does a self-describing type in .Net mean?

Posted by tzup on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by tzup
Published on 2010-05-11T11:39:27Z Indexed on 2010/05/11 11:44 UTC
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Given this MSDN article, we learn that the Common Type System in .Net has this classification of reference types:

"Reference types can be self-describing types, pointer types, or interface types. The type of a reference type can be determined from values of self-describing types. Self-describing types are further split into arrays and class types."

So an array, for instance, is a self-describing type because we can determine it's type from its values?
How?
Is that it, or is there more to this definition?

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