Assigning string to class redirects it to property

Question

I have a class named Car with property Name. Now every time I like to change Name of my Car I must write Car1.Name = "Porka Turbo". Now what I would like to acomplish is 5 characters less to write like this:

Car1 = "Porka Turbo"

It should work like this: if I assign a class derrived from Car class it should make regular class assignment, but when I assign string to my class than this string should be redirected to property called "Name".

So that it will work the same as:

Car1.Name = "Porka Turbo"

Is this possible in C# .NET 3.5 and if not do you know any other method to write less in this particular example?

Answer 1

It is not possible since the assignment operator cannot be overloaded.

Even it it would be possible, I shouldn't do it. What do you gain with it ?
A few less characters that you have to type ? Keep the fact in the back of your mind that code is being read far more often than it is written.
When you re-read / review that code after a year or 2, I think you'll be scratching the back of your head a few times ...

Besides, suppose that it would be possible to overload the assignment operator:

What will you do if you want to assign another Car instance to Car1 ?

What will you do if Car1 is NULL ?

Answer 2

No, C# does not allow you to overload the assignment operator.

Answer 3

I don't know if there is a way of accomplishing what you are looking for (perhaps there is), but I would advice against doing so, since I would find it confusing. For starters, it would make the Car1 instance in your example to act as if it was a string (which it is not), and it will be less clear what the code actually does.

Answer 4

Assuming Car1 is a variable of type Car, you can't do it. Nor should you - it's a readability nightmare.

Assignment to a variable should mean a change in the value of the variable to the (possibly converted) value on the RHS of the assignment operator. You're trying to change the meaning of the operator.

If you're bothered by the number of characters in the far more readable:

Car1.Name = "Porka Turbo";

you could create a single-letter method:

Car1.X("Porka Turbo");

Or another property:

Car1.N = "Porka Turbo";

I wouldn't do either of those though. Keep the code simple and readable. Whoever has to maintain the code in the future (which may be you) will not thank you if you prioritise "minimal number of characters in source" over readability.

EDIT: One option which hasn't been presented yet is providing an implicit conversion from string to Car. That would let you write

Car1 = "Porka Turbo";

but it wouldn't be changing the name property of the existing car - it would be creating a new car and assigning that value to Car1. I mention this only in case someone else drops that in as an option without mentioning the problem with it :)

Answer 5

I think a very deep misunderstanding of OOP is the root of this request, in the first place. The good thing with an object oriented language like C# is that an object of the type Car will always be a Car, and nothing else. A string will always be a string, and a String will never be a Car. Wrapping a piece of text within double quotation marks happens to be shorthand for creating a new string instance. There is no such shorthand for creating a new Car instance. You can never say that "This string is actually a Car", for reasons like, say, the fact that a String doesn't have the "Name" property.

The best thing I can say is, keep working with C#, and soon enough you'll come to appreciate that this is the case =)