C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

Chapter 5 Operators

What’s in This Chapter

• Arithmetic, concatenation, comparison, logical, and bitwise operators
• Operator precedence
• DateTime and TimeSpan operators
• Operator overloading
• Type conversion operators

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An operator is a basic code element that performs some operation on one or more values to create a result. The values the operator acts upon are operands. For example, in the following statement, the operator is + (addition), the operands are B and C, and the result is assigned to the variable A.

A = B + C

C# operators fall into five categories: arithmetic, concatenation, comparison, logical, and bitwise. This chapter first explains these categories and the operators they contain; it then discusses other operator issues such as precedence, assignment operators, and operator overloading.

Arithmetic Operators

The following table lists the arithmetic operators provided by C#. Most of these should be familiar to you.

Operator	Purpose	Example	Result
++	Increment	x++ or ++x	Sets x = x + 1
--	Decrement	x-- or --x	Sets x = x - 1
–	Negation	-x	Sets x = -x
+	Unary plus	+x	Sets x = +x (leaves x unchanged)
*	Multiplication	2 * 3	6
/	Division	3.0 / 2	1.5
%	Modulus	17 mod 5	2
+	Addition	2 + 3	5
-	Subtraction	3 - 2	1
<<	Bit left shift	10110111 << 1	01101110
>>	Bit right ...