Accelerated C# 2008

operation on the value type’s data. Generics come to the rescue and stop this madness. As an exam-

ple, compile the following code, and then load the assembly into ILDASM to compare the IL

generated for each of the methods that accept a Stack instance:

using System;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Generic;

public class EntryPoint

{

static void Main() {

}

public void NonGeneric( Stack stack ) {

foreach( object o in stack ) {

int number = (int) o;

Console.WriteLine( number );

}

}

public void Generic( Stack<int> stack ) {

foreach( int number in stack ) {

Console.WriteLine( number );

}

}

}

You’ll notice that the IL code generated by the NonGeneric ...