CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
John Kraft
John Kraft

Reputation: 6840

More on Implied Types

As a follow up to the question what is the purpose of double implying...

Also, I read in an article a while back (no I don't remember the link) that it is inappropriate to do decimal dollars = 0.00M;. It stated that the appropriate way was decimal dollars = 0;. It also stated that this was appropriate for all numeric types. Is this incorrect, and why? If so, what is special about 0?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1032

Answers (1)

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1500665

Well, for any integer it's okay to use an implicit conversion from int to decimal, so that's why it compiles. (Zero has some other funny properties... you can implicitly convert from any constant zero expression to any enum type. It shouldn't work with constant expressions of type double, float and decimal, but it happens to do so in the MS compiler.)

However, you may want to use 0.00m if that's the precision you want to specify. Unlike double and float, decimal isn't normalized - so 0m, 0.0m and 0.00m have different representations internally - you can see that when you call ToString on them. (The integer 0 will be implicitly converted to the same representation as 0m.)

So the real question is, what do you want to represent in your particular case?

Upvotes: 11

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