Operator Overloading

C# allows you to override most of the language’s operators to provide class-specific functionality. The user-defined casts we discussed earlier are one example of this.

Perhaps the most obvious of these are the arithmetic operators, i.e. +, -, \, *. Consider our Vector3 class we defined earlier. If we wanted to overload the + operator to allow for vector addition, we could add it to the class definition:

/// <summary>
/// A class representing a 3-element vector
/// </summary>
public class Vector3 
{
    /// <summary>The x-coordinate</summary>
    public double X { get; set;}

    /// <summary>The y-coordinate</summary>
    public double Y { get; set;}

    /// <summary>The z-coordinate</summary>
    public double Z { get; set;}

    /// <summary>
    /// Constructs a new vector
    /// </summary>
    public Vector3(double x, double y, double z)
    {
        X = x;
        Y = y;
        Z = z;
    }

    /// Adds two vectors using vector addition
    public static Vector3 operator +(Vector3 v1, Vector3 v2)
    {
        return new Vector3(v1.X + v2.X, v1.Y + v2.Y, v1.Z + v2.Z);
    }
}

Note that we have to make the method static, and include the operator keyword, along with the symbol of the operation. This vector addition we are performing here is also a binary operation (meaning it takes two parameters). We can also define unary operations, like negation:

/// Negates a vector
public static Vector3 operator -(Vector3 v)
{
    return new Vector3(-v.X, -v.Y, -v.Z);
}

The full list of overloadable operators is found in the C# documentation