Question

In looking at this question which Jon did a fine job in answering… ‘How to read a text file reversly with iterator‘. And there was a similar question in which I answered using pointers hocus pocus..’.net is there a way to read a text file from bottom to top‘ before it got closed….

Now I did set out to try solve this using pointers, ok, it looks hackish and rough around the edges…

public class ReadChar : IEnumerable<char>
{
    private Stream _strm = null;
    private string _str = string.Empty;
    public ReadChar(string s)
    {
        this._str = s;
    }
    public ReadChar(Stream strm)
    {
        this._strm = strm;
    }
    public IEnumerator<char> GetEnumerator()
    {
        if (this._strm != null && this._strm.CanRead && this._strm.CanSeek)
        {
            return ReverseReadStream();
        }
        if (this._str.Length > 0)
        {
            return ReverseRead();
        }
        return null;
    }

    private IEnumerator<char> ReverseReadStream()
    {
        long lIndex = this._strm.Length;
        while (lIndex != 0 && this._strm.Position != 0)
        {
            this._strm.Seek(lIndex--, SeekOrigin.End);
            int nByte = this._strm.ReadByte();
            yield return (char)nByte; 
        }
    }

    private IEnumerator<char> ReverseRead()
    {
        unsafe
        {
            fixed (char* beg = this._str)
            {
                char* p = beg + this._str.Length;
                while (p-- != beg)
                {
                    yield return *p;
                }
            }
        }
    }
    IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator()
    {
        return GetEnumerator();
    }
}

but discovered that C# compiler cannot handle this using this implementation but was devastated when the C# compiler refused with an error CS1629 – ‘Unsafe code may not appear in iterators’

Why is that so?

Answer 1

Eric Lippert has an excellent blog post on this topic here: Iterator Blocks, Part Six: Why no unsafe code?