What's the deal with char.GetNumericValue?
- by mgroves
I was working on Project Euler 40, and was a bit bothered that there was no int.Parse(char). Not a big deal, but I did some asking around and someone suggested char.GetNumericValue. GetNumericValue seems like a very odd method to me:
Takes in a char as a parameter and returns...a double?
Returns -1.0 if the char is not '0' through '9'
So what's the reasoning behind this method, and what purpose does returning a double serve? I even fired up Reflector and looked at InternalGetNumericValue, but it's just like watching Lost: every answer just leads to another question.