C# Language Specification

Pointer arithmetic

In an unsafe context, the + and - operators (§7.8.4 and §7.8.5) can be applied to values of all pointer types except void*. Thus, for every pointer type T*, the following operators are implicitly defined:

T* operator +(T* x, int y);

T* operator +(T* x, uint y);
T* operator +(T* x, long y);
T* operator +(T* x, ulong y);

T* operator +(int x, T* y);

T* operator +(uint x, T* y);
T* operator +(long x, T* y);
T* operator +(ulong x, T* y);

T* operator –(T* x, int y);

T* operator –(T* x, uint y);
T* operator –(T* x, long y);
T* operator –(T* x, ulong y);

long operator –(T* x, T* y);

Given an expression P of a pointer type T* and an expression N of type int, uint, long, or ulong, the expressions P + N and N + P compute the pointer value of type T* that results from adding N * sizeof(T) to the address given by P. Likewise, the expression P - N computes the pointer value of type T* that results from subtracting N * sizeof(T) from the address given by P.

Given two expressions, P and Q, of a pointer type T*, the expression P – Q computes the difference between the addresses given by P and Q and then divides that difference by sizeof(T). The type of the result is always long. In effect, P - Q is computed as ((long)(P) - (long)(Q)) / sizeof(T).

For example:

using System;

class Test
{

static void Main() {

unsafe {
int* values = stackalloc int[20];
int* p = &values[1];
int* q = &values[15];
Console.WriteLine("p - q = {0}", p - q);
Console.WriteLine("q - p = {0}", q - p);
}
}
}

which produces the output:

p - q = -14
q - p = 14

If a pointer arithmetic operation overflows the domain of the pointer type, the result is truncated in an implementation-defined fashion, but no exceptions are produced.

7.