Strongly-typed integers

Question

As a thought experiment on a hobby project, I've been thinking of a way to ensure that this sort of subtle bug/typo doesn’t happen:

public void MyMethod(int useCaseId)
{
    // Do something with the useCaseId
}

public void SomeOtherMethod()
{
    int userId = 12;
    int useCaseId = 15;
    MyMethod(userId); // Ooops! Used the wrong value!
}

This bug would be hard to find because there’s no compile-time error, and you wouldn’t necessarily even get an exception at run-time. You’d just get "unexpected results".

To resolve this in a simple way, I’ve experimented with using empty enum definitions. Effectively making a user id a data type (without going quite as far as a class or a struct):

public enum UseCaseId { // Empty… }

public enum UserId { // Empty… }

public void MyMethod(UseCaseId useCaseId)
{
   // Do something with the useCaseId
}

public void SomeOtherMethod()
{
   UserId userId = (UserId)12;
   UseCaseId useCaseId = (UseCaseId)15;
   MyMethod(userId); // Compile error!!
}

What d’you think?

Answer 1

If you're going to the trouble of creating new types to hold UserId and UseCaseId, you could almost as easily make them into simple classes and use an implicit conversion operator from int to give you the syntax you want:

public class UserId
{
    public int Id { get; private set; }

    public UserId(int id)
    {
       id_ = id;
    }

    public static implicit operator UserId(int id)
    {
        return new UserId(id);
    }

    public static void Main()
    {
        UserId id1 = new UserId(1);
        UserId id2 = 2;
    }
}

That way, you get the type safety without having to litter your code with casts.