Contents tagged with Generics
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Detecting Default Values of Value Types
I don’t know if this happened to you: the need to find out if some instance of a class is the class’ default value. For reference types – which include nullables -, it is always null, and for value types, it is the value that you get if you do not initialize a field of that type or if you call its default parameterless constructor – false for Boolean, 0 for numbers, the 0 member of an enumeration, etc. So, the problem is, how can we tell if some instance represents this default value, dynamically, that is, for any value type, not just a specific one.