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In computer science, boxing (a.k.a. wrapping) is the transformation of placing a primitive type within an object so that the value can be used as a reference. Unboxing is the reverse transformation of extracting the primitive value from its wrapper object. Autoboxing is the term for automatically applying boxing and/or unboxing transformations ...
Boxing is the operation of converting a value of a value type into a value of a corresponding reference type. [15] Boxing in C# is implicit. Unboxing is the operation of converting a value of a reference type (previously boxed) into a value of a value type. [15] Unboxing in C# requires an explicit type cast. Example:
Boxing is the operation of converting a value-type object into a value of a corresponding reference type. [108] Boxing in C# is implicit. Unboxing is the operation of converting a value of a reference type (previously boxed) into a value of a value type. [108] Unboxing in C# requires an explicit type cast. A boxed object of type T can only be ...
In computer science, type conversion, [1] [2] type casting, [1] [3] type coercion, [3] and type juggling [4] [5] are different ways of changing an expression from one data type to another. An example would be the conversion of an integer value into a floating point value or its textual representation as a string , and vice versa.
Cannot use primitive types as type parameters; instead, the developer must use the wrapper type corresponding to the primitive type. This incurs extra performance overhead by requiring boxing and unboxing conversions as well a memory and garbage collection pressure, as the wrappers will be heap-allocated as opposed to stack-allocated.
In class-based programming, downcasting, or type refinement, is the act of casting a base or parent class reference, to a more restricted derived class reference. [1] This is only allowable if the object is already an instance of the derived class, and so this conversion is inherently fallible.
The reinterpret cast technique from C/C++ also works in Pascal. This can be useful, when eg. reading dwords from a byte stream, and we want to treat them as float. Here is a working example, where we reinterpret-cast a dword to a float:
So, the simplest solution, I guess, is to rename it. But I'm afraid the name Boxing, unboxing and autoboxing may narrow the scope of the article too much. The article starts with saying that an object type is a datatype, and so it should be about a general concept, mentioning boxing of a primitive data type as one example, not as a primary subject.