Question

Hey everyone. I have a function that works both with short input values, as with byte input values, here pixelData is an array filled with either bytes or shorts.

       byte oColor;
        if (pixelData[counter/3] < minValue)
            oColor = 0;
        else if (pixelData[counter/3] > maxValue)
            oColor = 255;
        else
            oColor = (byte)(((pixelData[counter/3] - (WindowLevel - (WindowWidth / 2))) * 255) / WindowWidth);

Then I have the following code:

bool isShort = ReadIsShort();
if(isShort){
 shortArray = ReadShortArray();
} else {
 byteArray = ByteArray();
}

To get either the short or the byte array. However, I cannot use them in function above. Since something like this doesn’t work.

var pixelData;
if(IsShort)
 pixelData = shortArray;
else
 pixelData = byteArray;

Anyone know how I should program this, since this clearly is a design flaw.

Answer 1

Since C# is a strongly typed language, every variable must have a well-defined type. Therefore, pixelData can only be either a short or a byte array. So far there’s no design flaw here imo.

I assume, that your computations are more or less performance-critical (since there are pixels involved :)), so I won’t repeat the suggestion of using boxing (cast to object[]) or creating Lists or similar things.

Even using generics is not an option, since you cannot give arithemtic type constraints for generic functions (see this qestion) The only solution I can think of is to duplicate the code and write two explicit versions, one for each data type.