Professional C# 2012 and .NET 4.5

Chapter 7

Operators and Casts

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Operators in C#
• The idea of equality when dealing with reference and value types
• Data conversion between primitive data types
• Converting value types to reference types using boxing
• Converting between reference types by casting
• Overloading the standard operators for custom types
• Adding cast operators to custom types

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at http://www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118314425 on the Download Code tab. The code for this chapter is divided into the following major examples:

• SimpleCurrency
• SimpleCurrency2
• VectorStruct
• VectorStructMoreOverloads

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 illustrates some powerful aspects of C# that enable you to extend its capabilities.

OPERATORS

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

C# supports the operators listed in the following table:

CATEGORY	OPERATOR
Arithmetic	+ − * / %
Logical	& | ∧ ~ && || !
String concatenation	+
Increment and decrement	++ ––
Bit shifting	<< >>
Comparison	== != < > <= >=
Assignment	= += -= *= /= %= &= |= ...