Polymorphic Numerics on .Net and In C#

Question

It\'s a real shame that in .Net there is no polymorphism for numbers, i.e. no INumeric interface that unifies the different kinds of numerical types such as bool, byte, uint

Answer 1

The csharp language team is already looking into this. If you want a view onto the future of type classes in C# start reading at

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang/issues/164

It seems to have the support of Mads Torgesson so it's not just a random post by a wandering Haskell fanboy.

The example given of a typeclass or shape in C# land is

public shape SGroup
{
    static T operator +(T t1, T t2);
    static T Zero { get; }
}

notice this is not like an interface. It is declaring static method that belong to SGroup. Read on for more details and discussion.