Polymorphic Numerics on .Net and In C#

Question

It\'s a real shame that in .Net there is no polymorphism for numbers, i.e. no INumeric interface that unifies the different kinds of numerical types such as bool, byte, uint

Answer 1

If you plan to use C# 4.0 then you can easily simulate generic mathematical operations using dynamic. Here is an example of a simple addition function (for more information see this blog):

public static T Add(T a, T b) {
  dynamic ad = a;
  dynamic bd = b;
  return ad + bd;
}

I haven't played with this, so I can't say much about the performance. There will certainly be some performance price for using dynamic, but I think the DLR should be able to do very effective optimizations if you'll invoke the function multiple times. In fact, I won't be surprised if it had similar performance profile as Generic Operators mentioned above.