I'm writing a class that does essentially the same type of calculation for each of the primitive numeric types in C#. Though the real calculation is more complex, think of it as a method to compute the average of a number of values, e.g.
class Calc
{
public int Count { get; private set; }
public int Total { get; private set; }
public int Average { get { return Count / Total; } }
public int AddDataPoint(int data)
{
Total += data;
Count++;
}
}
Now to support that same operation for double, float and perhaps other classes that define operator + and operator /, my first thought was to simply use generics:
class Calc<T>
{
public T Count { get; private set; }
public T Total { get; private set; }
public T Average { get { return Count / Total; } }
public T AddDataPoint(T data)
{
Total += data;
Count++;
}
}
Unfortunately C# is unable to determine whether T supports operators + and / so does not compile the above snippet. My next thought was to constrain T to types that support those operators, but my initial research indicates this cannot be done.
It's certainly possible to box each of the types I want to support in a class that implements a custom interface e.g. IMath and restrict T to that, but this code will be called a great number of times and I want to avoid boxing overhead.
Is there an elegant and efficient way to solve this without code duplication?