Having just glanced at the clock, now is the ideal time to post about an idea I had a little while ago – a book (or blog, or something) about C# (or maybe C# and Java) which I’d only write between midnight and one in the morning.

It would contain only those things which seemed like really good ideas at the time – but which might seem insane at other times. Most of these ideas are probably useless, but may contain a germ of interest. While I don’t always have those ideas between midnight and one, that’s the time of night when they seem most potent, and when I’d be most likely to be ready to write enthusiastically about them. The coding equivalent of “beer goggles” if you will.

A couple ideas I’ve had which would probably qualify:

Extension interfaces

If C# 3.0 is going to allow us to pretend to add methods to classes, which shouldn’t it allow us to pretend that classes implement interfaces they don’t? My original reason for wanting this is to get rid of some of the ugliness in the suggesting new XML APIs: there’s a method which takes an array of objects, even though only a handful of types are catered for. Unfortunately, those types don’t have an interface in common, so all the checking has to be done at runtime. If you could pretend that they all implement the same interface, just for the purposes of the API, you could declare the method as taking an array of the interface type. Of course, this is much less straightforward than converting what looks like an instance method call into a static method call…

Conditional returns

This came up when implementing Equals for several types in quick succession. All of them followed a very similar pattern, and there were similar things needed at the start of each implementation – simple checks for nullity, reference identity etc. It would be interesting to have a sort of “nullable return” for methods which had a non-nullable value type return type – I could write return? expression; where the expression was a nullable form of the return type, and it would only return if the expression was non-null. There are bits of this which appeal, and bits which seem horrible – but the main problem I have with it is that I suspect would rarely use it outside Equals implementations. (If this isn’t a clear enough description, I’m happy to write an example – just not right now.)

Every language has a few interesting corner cases – bits of surprising behaviour
which can catch you out if you’re unlucky. I’m not talking about the kind of thing
that all developers should really be aware of – the inefficiencies of repeatedly
concatenating strings, etc. I’m talking about things which you would never suspect
until you bump into them. Both C#/.NET and Java have some oddities in this respect,
and as most are understandable even to a developer who is used to the other, I thought
I’d lump them together.

Interned boxing – Java 1.5

Java 1.5 introduced autoboxing of primitive types – something .NET has had
from the start. In Java, however, there’s a slight difference – the boxed
types have been available for a long time, and are proper named reference
types just as you’d write elsewhere. In this example, we’ll look at
int boxing to java.lang.Integer. What would you
expect the results of the following operation to be?

Object x = 5;
Object y = 5;
boolean equality = (x==y);

Personally, I’d expect the answer to be false. We’re testing for reference equality
here, after all – and when you box two values, they’ll end up in different boxes,
even if the values are the same, right? Wrong. Java 1.5 (or rather, Sun’s current
implementation of Java 1.5) has a sort of cache of interned values between -128 and
127 inclusive. The language specification explicitly states that programmers shouldn’t
rely on two boxed values of the same original value being different (or being the
same, of course). Goodness only knows whether or not this actually yields performance
improvements in real life, but it can certainly cause confusion. I only ran into it
when I had a unit test which incorrectly asserted reference equality rather than
value equality between two boxed values. The tests worked for ages, until I added
something which took the value I needed to test against above 127.

Lazy initialisation and the static constructor – C#

One of the things which is sometimes important about the pattern I usually use when
implementing a singleton
is that it’s only initialised when it’s first used – or is it? After a newsgroup
question asked why the supposedly lazy pattern wasn’t working, I investigated a little,
finding out that there’s a big difference between using an initialiser directly on
the static field declaration, and creating a static constructor which assigns the value.
Full details on my beforefieldinit
page.

The old new object – .NET

I always believed that using new with a reference type would give me
a reference to a brand new object. Not quite so – the overload for the String
constructor which takes a char[] as its single parameter will return
String.Empty if you pass it an empty array. Strange but true.

When is == not reflexive? – .NET

Floating point numbers have been
the cause of many headaches over the years. It’s relatively well known that “not a number” is not equal
to itself (i.e. if x=double.NaN, then x==x is false).

It’s slightly more surprising when two values which look like they really, really should be equal just
aren’t. Here are a couple of sample programs:

using System;
public class Oddity1
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        double two = double.Parse("2");
        double a = double.Epsilon/two;
        double b = 0;
        Console.WriteLine(a==b);
        Console.WriteLine(Math.Abs(b-a) < double.Epsilon);
    }
}

On my computer, the above (compiled and run from the command line) prints out True twice.
If you comment out the last line, however, it prints False – but only under .NET 1.1.
Here’s another:

using System;

class Oddity2
{
    static float member;

    static void Main()
    {
        member = Calc();
        float local = Calc();
        Console.WriteLine(local==member);
        member = local;
    }

    static float Calc()
    {
        float f1 = 2.82323f;
        float f2 = 2.3f;
        return f1*f2;
    }
}

This time it prints out True until you comment out the last
line, which changes the result to False. This occurs on both .NET 1.1 and 2.0.

The reason for these problems is really the same – it’s a case of when the JIT decides to
truncate the result down to the right number of bits. Most CPUs work on 80-bit floating point
values natively, and provide ways of converting to and from 32 and 64 bit values. Now, if you
compare a value which has been calculated in 80 bits without truncation with a value which has
been calculated in 80 bits, truncated to 32 or 64, and then expanded to 80 again, you can run
into problems. The act of commenting or uncommenting the extra lines in the above changes what
the JIT is allowed to do at what point, hence the change in behaviour. Hopefully this will
persuade you that comparing floating point values directly isn’t a good idea, even in cases
which look safe.

That’s all I can think of for the moment, but I’ll blog some more examples as and when I see/remember
them. If you enjoy this kind of thing, you’d probably like
Java Puzzlers
– whether or not you use Java itself. (A lot of the puzzles there map directly to C#, and even those which
don’t are worth looking at just for getting into the mindset which spots that kind of thing.)