C# supports operator overloading as a language feature. This enables you to modify the behavior of a variety of operators in your classes. Operators like +, -, *, ! etc. In this video we’re going to be modifying a LinkedList to support two new operators + and - so we can add or remove objects from our list using code that looks like:

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list += object;
list += object2;
list -= object;

Hopefully this creates a handy shorthand for modifying our lists. Mostly though it’s intended to show off the ability to modify these operators in the first place 😄.

The AppendableList class looks like this:

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class AppendableList : LinkedList
{
    public static AppendableList operator +(AppendableList source, T obj) {
        source.AddLast(obj);
        return source;
    }

    public static AppendableList operator -(AppendableList source, T obj) {
        source.Remove(obj);
        return source;
    }
}

Note: YouTube does not support angled brackets. I’ve had to remove the generic arguments as a result. You’ll need to add them back before using this.

I’ve also made a slightly less useful implementation of operator overloads that overloads the greater than and less than operations to append or prepend strings together. It’s not quite as useful as an AppendableList but if you want to dive deeper into this feature it can be another resource. https://youtu.be/yhzBaeroj2o

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