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Can I create ternary operators in C# ?

Answer 1

A:

Have you tried searching for ternary operators in google to see if something already exists?

Mark Redman 2010-02-05 08:05:36

Yes, the 2 hour (this time) search still showed me that a ? b : c appears to be the only ternary operation.

Scott S 2010-02-05 08:11:14

Answer 2

+3 A:

You can't do that. You can only implement existing operators, and there is no ternary .<.<. operator in C#.

Besides, such an operator would be ambiguous with existing comparing operators. For example, would the expression a == b == c == d mean ((a == b) == c) == d or (a == b == c) == d?

Guffa 2010-02-05 08:06:10

Scott S 2010-02-05 08:09:30

Guffa 2010-02-05 08:18:08

Well, the idea could be expansive, similar to a function call with an arbitrary number of parameters. But it would also be based on a library that I would use to bypass standard equivalence tests.

Scott S 2010-02-05 22:08:06

Answer 3

A:

No. Not in C#. Language extension in this way is not available in any current version of C#, but Luca Bolognese pointed to using the compiler as a service and some functionality which could permit extending the language in such a way here: http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT11.

codekaizen 2010-02-05 08:06:25

Answer 4

A:

If you want to do that for the primitive datatypes, you're out of luck. C# doesn't support adding operators to those.

In your own datatypes it is possible to return a special datatype which stores the intermediate result and the comparisson result. However, I suggest you just stick to the c# language - if you really want the a < b < c operator style, switch to Python.

Koert 2010-02-05 08:06:35

Would it be easy to integrate Python methods into C# funtion calls as a dual language program? (my experience with Python has been helping friends debug and it looked more like a scripting language)

Scott S 2010-02-05 08:13:54

Python is a full-flegded programming language, and IronPython is an implementation of it that runs on the .NET platform and hence is interoperable with C#. See http://ironpython.net/

Håvard S 2010-02-05 08:18:18

Interoperable - yes, but they still can't be mixed; you always only work in one language, so using the a<b<c idiom in c# is still out of the question

Koert 2010-02-05 08:32:34

Answer 5

+5 A:

Sorry, you cannot create your own operators in C#.

You could use extension methods to enable a fluent syntax like

bool f = b.IsBetween(a, c);

Or, if you were being extremely clever, you could do:

bool f = a.IsLessThan(b).IsLessThan(c);

doing so is tricky, but possible. (Hint: define a custom object that IsLessThan returns that tracks its bounds and understands how it is combined with other instances of the object. Essentially this is how LINQ-to-SQL works with regard to combining Where, Select, and so on.)

But you cannot define your own operator syntaxes in C#.

If you are interested in languages where you can define your own operators, you might consider looking into F#.

Eric Lippert 2010-02-05 18:22:02

Answer 6

+5 A:

Porges 2010-05-12 23:51:39

That's pretty cool. So you can do `if (1.Chain() < i < 5)`

Igor Zevaka 2010-05-12 23:55:19

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Can I create ternary operators in C# ?

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