The & operator (Concatenation)

The &operator

@ Head — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 02:53:02 GMT

I just read again today the claim that you should use + for string concatenation in VB. You should NOT

Obscure language bug #29: Intrinsics and operator overloading

Panopticon Central — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 20:25:33 GMT

Why doesn't concatenation work with non intrinsic types ?

@ Head — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 02:55:36 GMT

If you used VB.NET, you might have noticed that you can't do concatenation on non intrinsic types. For...

re: The & operator (Concatenation)

bill — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:36:56 GMT

<g> Not sure if you mean operators in general, or just on reference types.
With reference types that aren't sealed, I think instance functions are generally preferable, but that would be a broad critisism of the use of Public Shared (aka public static methods), not just operators.
On operator overloading, I think it usually best to minimise their usage. There's very few cases where the behaviour is always clear and intuitive. Conversion operators being the most common usage.
That of course leads us back to the "bug" or behaviour of & with custom types. I think it would be preferable that the behaviour does accept the widening operator to string if it does exist, as then people won't be defining the & operator rather they'll just use the & operator on the strings, e.g:

x = foo1 & "-" & foo2

re: The & operator (Concatenation)

David M. Kean — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 05:55:38 GMT

God help us all if users actually started to define these operators on reference types...