Question

I’m teaching myself CIL and have been doing ok so far (just really started yesterday) but I have run into a problem I can’t really figure out. I’m prompting the user for an int (int32) and then storing it and converting it to a float and displaying it. However, whatever I enter comes out different as a float. Here is my code:

.assembly variables {}
.method public static void main() cil managed
{
    .entrypoint
    .maxstack 8
    .locals init (float64)

    ldstr "Enter a digit: "
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    call int32 [mscorlib]System.Console::Read()
    conv.r8
    stloc.0
    ldstr "as a float: "
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    ldloc.0
    dup
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::Write(float64)
    stloc.0
    ldstr "Stored in location 0"
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    ldloc.0
    conv.i4
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(int32)
    call int32 [mscorlib]System.Console::Read() // to pause before closing window
    pop
    ret
}

I was just fooling around with CIL but figured I’d throw in my whole example for clarity. It compiles fine but when I type in 5 it returns 53 as the float AND the converted int32.

Can somebody please shed some light on what I’m doing wrong!

---

EDIT: Thanks to Marc Gravell I was able to figure it out. For those who are interested, here is the correct code:

.assembly variables {}
.method public static void main() cil managed
{
    .entrypoint
    .maxstack 8
    .locals init (float64)

    ldstr "Enter a digit: "
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    call string [mscorlib]System.Console::ReadLine()
    call int32 [mscorlib]System.Int32::Parse(string)
    conv.r8
    stloc.0
    ldstr "as a float: "
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    ldloc.0
    dup
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::Write(float64)
    stloc.0
    ldstr "Stored in location 0"
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(string)
    ldloc.0
    conv.i4
    call void [mscorlib]System.Console::WriteLine(int32)
    call int32 [mscorlib]System.Console::Read() // to pause before closing window
    pop
    ret
}

Answer 1

Console.Read returns a Unicode code-point, or -1 for EOF. 53 is the code-point of the character (not integer) '5'.

You could perhaps use Console.ReadLine and int.Parse.