Question

I a modeling a system to evaluate expressions. Now the operands in these expressions can be of one of several types including some primitive .NET types. When defining my Expression class, I want some degree of type-safety and therefore don’t want to use ‘object’ for the operand object type, so I am considering defining an abstract Operand base class with nothing in it and creating a subclass for each type of Operand. What do you think of this?

Also, only some types of operands make sense with others. And finally, only some operators make sense with particular operands. I can’t really think of a way to implement these rules at compile-time so I’m thinking I’ll have to do these checks at runtime.

Any ideas on how I might be able to do this better?

Answer 1

How about Expression in 3.5? I recently wrote an expression parser/compiler using this.