Question

Let’s say I have a system that must store how many people voted on fighter A and how many on fighter B.

Let’s say ratio is 200:1

How can I store that value in a single variable, instead of storing both values (number of voters on A and number of voters on B) in two variables.

How you would do that?

Answer 1

From the way that the question is worded this might not be the answer you are looking for, but the easiest way is to use a struct:

struct Ratio
{
    public Ratio(int a, int b)
    {
        this.a = a;
        this.b = b;
    }

    public int a = 1;
    public int b = 1;
}

You will almost certainly want to use properties instead of fields and you will probably also want to overload == and !=, something like:

public static bool operator ==(Ratio x, Ratio y)
{
    if (x.b == 0 || y.b == 0)
        return x.a == y.a;
    // There is some debate on the most efficient / accurate way of doing the following
    // (see the comments), however you get the idea! :-)
    return (x.a * y.b) == (x.b / y.a);
}

public static bool operator !=(Ratio x, Ratio y)
{
    return !(x == y);
}

public override string ToString()
{
    return string.Format("{0}:{1}", this.a, this.b);
}