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Asked: 2026-06-04T06:16:31+00:00

I’ve been wondering about this: would you support using simply an object as a

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I’ve been wondering about this: would you support using simply an object as a parameter in your method? My reason behind doing this would be overloading. Currently, I’m trying to create a method that caters to many different datatypes: string, decimal, DateTime… the list goes on.

It’s getting a bit messy though, so I was thinking of doing the following

public void GenericMethod(object val)
{
    if (val is string)
        // process as string
    else if (val is decimal)
        // process as decimal
    else if (val is DateTime)
        // do something for dt
    else
        // ...
}

What do you think of such a method? Would it incur unnecessary overhead? (during type checking) Have you implemented it? Tell me…

EDIT: Yeah, and just a sidenote, I’m kinda familiar with overloading. But it gets a little annoying when there are like more than 10 overloads…

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve been wondering about this: would you support using simply an object as a parameter in your method?

    Very rarely. If there’s a fixed set of types which are properly supported – and you’ll throw an exception otherwise – then I’d use overloads.

    If you can actually accept any type, and you’ll handle a not-specially-supported type in some well-known way, then it’s okay to accept object. That’s what LINQ to XML does all over the place, and the result is a very clean API. I’d do it very carefully though – it’s rarely a good idea.

    And yes, there’d be an overhead. I wouldn’t usually make that the basis of the decision though – the overhead will be small enough to be negligible in most cases. Design your API as cleanly as you can, then work out whether it’s going to cause a bottleneck.

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