Why can't System.Array be a type constraint?

Question

I'm working on a small project with a few different types of arrays (e.g. double[], float[], int[]. For verification / testing / sanity purposes, I'm printing out some of these arrays to the console as I go along. So I have multiple functions that look like these below (simplified for this example - assume I'm only dealing with single-dimension arrays):

void Print(float[] a) // prints an array of floats
{
    for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++)
    {
        Console.Write(a[i]);
    }
}

void Print(double[] a) // prints an array of doubles
{
    for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++)
    {
        Console.Write(a[i]);
    }
}

I, in my infinite wisdom, thought I could reduce some of the code duplication by simply creating a generic version of these functions. So I tried this:

void Print<T>(T t) where T : Array
{
    for (int i = 0; i < t.Length; i++)
    {
        Console.Write(t.GetValue(i));
    }
}

Intellisense isn't complaining, but the compiler fails with a very interesting error:

Constraint cannot be special class 'System.Array'

I've looked for an explanation (similar to Object or sealed classes, but haven't found much, besides a mention on msdn. Can anyone explain to me why this is the case? Why can't I specify a type constraint of System.Array?

p.s.: While typing this out, I realized that I can accomplish what I originally wanted more easily, with a simple function like this:

void Print(System.Array a)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++)
    {
        Console.Write(a.GetValue(i));
    }
}

Is this why there's a special rule for arrays in the compiler?

Answer 1

The appropriate syntax to do what you want is this:

void Print<T>(T[] array)
{
    for (int i = 0; i < array.Length; i++)
    {
        Console.Write(array[i]);
    }
}