Professional C# 2005

Chapter 5. Operators and Casts

The preceding chapters have covered most of what you need to start writing useful programs using C#. This chapter completes the discussion of the essential language elements and goes on to discuss powerful aspects of C# that allow you to extend the capabilities of the C# language. Specifically, this chapter discusses the following:

• The operators available in C#

• The idea of equality when dealing with reference and value types

• Data conversion between the primitive data types

• Converting value types to reference types using boxing

• Converting between reference types by casting

• Overloading the standard operators to support operations on the custom types you define

• Adding cast operators to the custom types you define to support seamless data type conversions

Operators

Although most of C#'s operators should be familiar to C and C++ developers, this section discusses the most important ones for the benefit of new programmers and Visual Basic converts, and to shed light on some of the changes introduced with C#.

C# supports the operators listed in the following table, although four (sizeof, *, ->, and &) are only available in unsafe code (code that bypasses C#'s type safety checking), which is discussed in Chapter 7, "Memory Management and Pointers":

Category	Operator
Arithmetic	+ - * / %
Logical	& | ^ ~ && || !
String concatenation	+
Increment and decrement	++ --
Bit shifting	<< >>
Comparison	== != < > <= >=
Assignment	= += -= *= /= %= &= |= ^= <<= >>=
Member access (for objects and ...