The hot water still isn’t fixed. I’m not in the mood for another “a world apart” joke today 😉 In the meantime, here’s a wicked feature from C# that I like.
It’s the ‘checked’ keyword and it can be used either within your code or as a switch for the command line compiler. It makes sure that a statement is a valid, sort of like C++’s ASSERT but a little bit stricter in terms of built in data types. For example, the largest possible value of a signed integer is 2147483647. So if you tried to store the sum of 2 billion multiplied by two, you could never get 4 billion as the result because signed integers on x86 hardware with 32-bit environments can’t hold a number larger than 2147483647. Instead, you’d end up with a weird value that is the difference of our intended 4 billion value and the maximium 32-bit value (that’s 4294967296). That sucks. But C#‘s ‘checked’ keyword will throw an exception if you try to do something crazy like that. Observe:
<br />class CheckedTest<br />{<br /> static void Main()<br /> {<br /> int a = 2000000000;<br /><br /> a *= 2;<br /><br /> // freaky-deaky value will be printed<br /> System.Console.WriteLine(a);<br /> }<br />}<br /> |
If we use the checked keyword (or the compiler switch), an overflow exception would be thrown:
<br />checked<br />{<br /> int a = 2000000000;<br /> a *= 2;<br />}<br /> |
That’ll make sure that we didn’t assign ‘a’ some value that’s too large, both when we declare it and when it’s multplied it by two. You can even use it on a single line:
int x;
x = checked(2000000000 * 2);
Nice 😉
