I’m writing a class that does essentially the same type of calculation for each

Question

0

Asked: May 17, 20262026-05-17T21:30:16+00:00 2026-05-17T21:30:16+00:00

I’m writing a class that does essentially the same type of calculation for each

0

I’m writing a class that does essentially the same type of calculation for each of the primitive numeric types in C#. Though the real calculation is more complex, think of it as a method to compute the average of a number of values, e.g.

class Calc
{
    public int Count { get; private set; }
    public int Total { get; private set; }
    public int Average { get { return Count / Total; } }
    public int AddDataPoint(int data)
    {
        Total += data;
        Count++;
    }
}

Now to support that same operation for double, float and perhaps other classes that define operator + and operator /, my first thought was to simply use generics:

class Calc<T>
{
    public T Count { get; private set; }
    public T Total { get; private set; }
    public T Average { get { return Count / Total; } }
    public T AddDataPoint(T data)
    {
        Total += data;
        Count++;
    }
}

Unfortunately C# is unable to determine whether T supports operators + and / so does not compile the above snippet. My next thought was to constrain T to types that support those operators, but my initial research indicates this cannot be done.

It’s certainly possible to box each of the types I want to support in a class that implements a custom interface e.g. IMath and restrict T to that, but this code will be called a great number of times and I want to avoid boxing overhead.

Is there an elegant and efficient way to solve this without code duplication?