creating a generic sort method

Question

I am learning generic types and wanted to create a generic QuickSort method, the problem is classes are not co-variant and code cannot compile. the problem is making the Par

Answer 1

What you're looking for is to constrain T to any type that implements IComparable

This MSDN article nicely explains generic constrains in C#. Your method declaration will look like this:

public static T Partition(T[] array, int mid)
    where T : IComparable
{
    //code goes here
}

public static void QuickSort(T[] array, int lower, int upper)
    where T : IComparable
{
    //code goes here
}

It might also be helpful to link you to the MSDN article for IComparable. Wherever you'd regularly compare two ints, you would instead call array[midPoint].CompareTo(array[upperBound]) > 0. All the comparison operators are the same if you check the result of CompareTo against 0.

And a small side note, when you call Swap(..., the compiler can infer the type as int and you can simply call it as Swap(....