C# 5.0 Unleashed

Delegate Types

As you’ve seen repeatedly, the Common Language Runtime (CLR) provides type safety, making programs more robust against errors introduced by programmers. It’s no surprise that delegates are no exception to this rule. This immediately contrasts delegate types against raw function pointers as seen in languages such as C and C++:

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int add(int a, int b) {    return a + b;}void main() {    int (*fpAdd)(int, int);    fpAdd = &add;    int three = fpAdd(1, 2); // calls the add function through the pointer}

Although the preceding fragment is well written, lots of opportunities exist to perform unsafe operations. For example, you could trick fpAdd so that it points to a function that takes arguments of types ...