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[Sorry for not posting, but I've been *way* too busy, and blogging is the first thing to cut when push comes to shove]

After my last post on Pascal's Triangle, Brian Keller and I were in his office when he shot me a concerned look and wondered why anyone would care about Pascal's triangle.  Some examples include calculating the odds of winning a pick six lotto ticket, or knowing how many possible hands you can have with a deck of cards.  Given an N of 52 (cards), and an R of 5 (# of cards in a hand) we can plug this into our code and see that there are 2,598,960 unique hands for poker.  I also switched my code to use double because of arithmetic overflows for ints.  By default, C# does not do boundary checking for arithmetic operations and values silently overflow for runtime expressions. 

Note: Constant expressions don't need the checked keyword as they are checked at compile time rather then runtime. 

 There are a couple of ways you can check for overflows, including the checked keyword and compiler switch shown below:

Use for a particular expression:

 a = checked(b * c);  

Use it for a block of code

checked 
{
    a = b * c;
    d = e * f;
}

Use Visual Studio to check all arithmetic operations in a given project

1. Right click on the project name in Solution Explorer
2. Select Properties
3. Under the Configuration Options folder select Build
4. Change "Check for arithmetic overflow" from false to true

Use the command line compiler to do the same thing

1. Run:

   csc.exe foo.cs /checked

Tip: You can also run /checked with a + or - symbol telling the compiler whether you want it to throw an exception if there is an overflow.

csc.exe foo.cs /checked+

If you want to turn off arithmetic checking at compile time for constants (please tell me why you would want to do this), you can also use the unchecked keyword:

a = unchecked(2 * 3);