I heard someone say that in C#, capital Decimal is using more memory than lower case decimal, because Decimal is resolved to the lowercase decimal and that requires memory.
Is that true?
+8
A:
No.
decimal is simply an alias for System.Decimal. They're exactly the same and the alias is resolved at compile-time.
Joey
2009-11-27 08:18:43
thanks for your quick answer!
google
2009-11-27 08:54:11
A:
No. That's just silly.
In C#, decimal is just a synonym for Decimal. The compiler will treat decimal declarations as Decimal, and the compiled code will be as if Decimal was used.
Tor Haugen
2009-11-27 08:18:45
With all due respect, it isn't "silly" - it is a perfectly valid question, especially if you come from a java background where the difference is boxed vs unboxed - i.e. a big difference. It **happens** that in C# they are the same.
Marc Gravell
2009-11-27 12:50:58
The OP is referring to the c# decimal alias vs the System.Decimal type
Richard Szalay
2009-11-27 08:20:20
Richard: Yes, and the situation is the same for `decimal` or for `long` or `int`, etc.
Joey
2009-11-27 08:21:19
+3
A:
No, that is not true.
The decimal keyword is an alias for the type System.Decimal. They are the exact same type, so there is no memory difference and no performance difference. If you use reflection to look at the compiled code, it's not even possible to tell if the alias or the system type was used in the source code.
There is two differences in where you can use the alias and the system type, though:
The
decimalalias is always the system type and can not be changed in any way. The use of theDecimalidentifier relies on importing theSystemnamespace. The unambiguous name for the system type isglobal::System.Decimal.Some language constructs only accept the alias, not the type. I can't think of an example for
decimal, but when specifying the underlying type for an enum you can only use language aliases likeint, not the corresponing system type likeSystem.Int32.
Guffa
2009-11-27 08:26:41