Average function without overflow exception

Question

.NET Framework 3.5.
I\'m trying to calculate the average of some pretty large numbers.
For instance:

using System;
using System.Linq;

class Program
{
           


        

Answer 1

If you're just looking for an arithmetic mean, you can perform the calculation like this:

public static double Mean(this IEnumerable source)
{
    if (source == null)
    {
        throw Error.ArgumentNull("source");
    }

    double count = (double)source.Count();
    double mean = 0D;

    foreach(long x in source)
    {
        mean += (double)x/count;
    }

    return mean;
}

Edit:

In response to comments, there definitely is a loss of precision this way, due to performing numerous divisions and additions. For the values indicated by the question, this should not be a problem, but it should be a consideration.