the pains of casting ushort + ushort...

  • Thread starter Thread starter xlar54
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xlar54

I have some code that ends up looking alot like:

ushort x = (ushort)(m + b);

whereas both m and b are ushorts also. This is due to the automatic
casting of values to int. Some quick questions:

1 - Why? Why would they do this, this way? Why not automatically cast
it to the size of the recipient variable? I have not benchmarked
this, but I cant imagine using many of these casts all over the place -
in order to keep memory usage low - would be faster than the compiler
doing this automatically. And frankly, its very ugly. I can see lazy
developers using ints wherever they want since its quicker. (and then
using unnecessary validation code to check their values).

2 - Would it be possible to write up some operator overloads that
handle this, and create a custom type? Sure, you're still stuck with
the casting on your own, but the effect would be cleaner and more
readable.

Thanks for the replies in advance
 
xlar54 said:
I have some code that ends up looking alot like:

ushort x = (ushort)(m + b);

whereas both m and b are ushorts also. This is due to the automatic
casting of values to int. Some quick questions:

1 - Why? Why would they do this, this way? Why not automatically cast
it to the size of the recipient variable? I have not benchmarked
this, but I cant imagine using many of these casts all over the place -
in order to keep memory usage low - would be faster than the compiler
doing this automatically. And frankly, its very ugly. I can see lazy
developers using ints wherever they want since its quicker. (and then
using unnecessary validation code to check their values).
Click to expand...

Two guesses:

1) the result of adding two ushort is not necesarrily a ushort

2) programming tradition tradition
2 - Would it be possible to write up some operator overloads that
handle this, and create a custom type? Sure, you're still stuck with
the casting on your own, but the effect would be cleaner and more
readable.
Click to expand...

No you can not overload ushort+ushort.

The operator overload must be defined in the class itself.

I guess you could create a wrapper class. But performance would
probably suffer.

Arne
 
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