Why does Convert.ToInt32(Int32) exist?

Question

There is an overload of Convert.ToInt32 that takes Int32 as the parameter. But even the documentation says that basically nothing happens and the method returns its input.

The question is why do we have such overload? Is there any purpose of it? Can anyone give me an example of using this method?

My thoughts: I think we may have it because there is an overload that takes Object. And thus we want to eliminate boxing and so on. But I'm not sure.

Answer 1

My ideas:

• For code generation: Especially in .NET 2.0, a lot of code as e.g. typed data sets were generated. Having an overload like Convert.ToInt32(Int32) simplifies the code generator but does not hamper runtime performance, since the call is probably JITed away immediately
• For consistency: There is an IConvertible interface in .NET since 2.0 or maybe even since 1.0 that is used by the Convert class. This interface demands methods like ToInt32, etc.

Code Generation (more details): The usual method to generate code back in .NET 2.0 times was System.CodeDOM as it provides means to reuse the same code generator for multiple languages, most prominently VB.NET and C#. In CodeDOM, you don't need to know of what type a given expression is to call a method, you can simply create a CodeMethodCallExpression given on the target object expression and the methods name. On the other hand, many cast operators such like C#s as operator are not supported by CodeDOM.

As a consequence, it is often hard to know the type of a given code expression in CodeDOM. This totally makes sense as many methods that an expression may involve are also part of the generated code and thus unknown at generation time. However, in some cases you need a particular expression converted to a given type, such as System.Int32. I can imagine this actually happened for typed data sets, although I am not 100% sure. Because Convert.ToInt32 exists, the generator does not need to know whether a given expression is of type System.Int32 or not. When the compiler compiles the generated code, all the methods signatures are available and the compiler may figure out that the type of the expression is System.Int32 and call the appropriate overload.

On the other side, the JIT compiler will detect that the method Convert.ToInt32 will simply return its argument. But as the method is not virtual, the methods body can be inserted into the callers code instead of calling Convert.ToInt32 as the overhead of calling the method would be much higher than the method body.

Answer 2

Only the API designers know.

If I had to make a guess, I would guess it is for the sake of consistency - for example, when you are using reflection to dynamically create calls, it's easier if you can make the assumption that every Convert.ToX(Y) combination exists for any primitive types X and Y.