Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

12.2. Understanding Operator Overloading

C#, like any programming language, has a canned set of tokens that are used to perform basic operations on intrinsic types. For example, you know that the + operator can be applied to two integers in order to yield a larger integer:

// The + operator with ints.
int a = 100;

int b = 240;
int c = a + b;  // c is now 340

Once again, this is no major newsflash, but have you ever stopped and noticed how the same + operator can be applied to most intrinsic C# data types? For example, consider this code:

// + operator with strings.
string s1 = "Hello";
string s2 = " world!";
string s3 = s1 + s2;  // s3 is now "Hello world!"

In essence, the + operator functions in specific ways based on the supplied data types ...