Hi,

I have done exercise 4 in chapter 7 (virtually identical to the post by seblake in this forum).

However when the line:
myDirection = checked((orientation)myByte)
... is hit it WORKS!

I thought that the whole point of using "checked" like this (as the book itself tells you to do in the exercise text) that an OverflowException would occur if you entered a value that was not in the range 1 to 4 (in other words north = 1 etc...) of the orientation enum.

I have to admit I am using .NET v1.1 and this is a v1.0 book, but I can't believe this behaviour has changed.

Can anybody confirm that they thought the same would happen or am I missing something?

As far as I can see the line of code:
    myDirection = checked((orientation)myByte)
..is completely pointless since by the time we get to this line we know that we have a valid byte from the Console.ReadLine(), so doing the checked conversion does absolutely nothing for us since it allows values outside the orientation enum range.

Bye,
Peter

First, if you have a byte type defined for myByte, there is no type conversion for checked() to test because the enum underlying type is also byte. In the example that you reference, I used a string data type value which had to be converted to byte.

Second, the enumeration class has no method for range analysis -- your code has to provide for any testing and error handling. Simply casting a byte value that was not included within the enumeration does not raise an error on its own.

Hi,

Thanks for responding; however I don't see how your code of:

orientation myDirection;
Console.WriteLine("Enter a whole number to consider:");
myDirection = checked((orientation)Convert.ToByte(Console.ReadLi ne()));

is operating any differently to my code of:

byte myByte;
orientation myDirection
Console.WriteLine("Enter a small number:");
myByte = Convert.ToByte(Console.ReadLine());
myDirection = checked((orientation)myByte);

The only difference as far as I can see is that your doing the read, convert to byte, checked convert to orientation in one line of code whereas I am doing it in 2 lines. In fact I commented out the myByte stuff and replaced the checked conversion with your line of code and it still does not cause an OverflowException.

Therefore my original question stands, what was the authors point of telling use to use such syntax since it does absolutley nothing for us.

Regards,
Peter