Professional C# 4 and .NET 4

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

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 allow you to extend the capabilities of the C# language.

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	= += -= *= /= %= &= |= ^= <<= >>=
Member access (for objects and structs)	.
Indexing (for arrays and indexers)	[]
Cast	()
Conditional (the ternary operator)	?:
Delegate concatenation and removal (discussed in Chapter 8, "Delegates, Lambdas, and Events")	+ -
Object creation	new
Type information	sizeof is typeof as
Overflow exception control	checked unchecked
Indirection and address	[]
Namespace alias qualifier ...