B# .NET Blog

Last week, I introduced C# 2.0 to a few academic people who had prior exposure to C, C++ and Java. Does language matter is an often heard question. Well, in the world of .NET, the importance of language choice has somewhat blurred but richness of languages still is a great decision factor, certainly for general-purpose languages.

Typical samples of developer convenience in the world of C# include the foreach loop, nullable types, generics, etc. One more dark feature is the principle of iterators and lazyness however; the typical example of an even number generator and the explanation of a finate state automaton isn't the best approach to introduce this feature...

So, I came up with another (more academic) sample: the Pascal triangle. For those who're not familiar with this concept, it looks as follows:

    1
   1 1
  1 2 1
 1 3 3 1
1 4 6 4 1

Basically, each number inside the triangle (i.e. without the borders that always contain 1) is the sum of the two numbers above it. And yes, it has its use (beside of a geeky wallpaper layout for math freaks): every row indicates the coefficients of the mixed products of a and b when calculating (a+b)^n (Binomium of Newton).

So, here's the code:

 1 using System;
 2 using System.Collections.Generic;
 3 
 4 class Pascal
 5 {
 6    static void Main()
 7    {
 8       foreach (uint[] row in GetPascalTriangle())
 9       {
10          Print(row);
11          Console.ReadKey();
12       }
13    }
14 
15    static void Print(uint[] row)
16    {
17       foreach (uint e in row)
18          Console.Write("{0}\t", e);
19       Console.WriteLine();
20    }
21 
22    static IEnumerable<uint[]> GetPascalTriangle()
23    {
24       uint[] row = new uint[1] { 1 };
25 
26       for(int n = 2; ; n++)
27       {
28          yield return row;
29 
30          uint[] nrow = new uint[n];
31          Array.Copy(row, nrow, n-1);
32          for (int i = 1; i < n; i++)
33             nrow[i] += row[i-1];
34          row = nrow;
35       }
36    }
37 }

The code above produces something like this:

If you want to know how iterators work, check out my former post on C# 2.0 Iterators.