Question

Q) why ‘public’ & ‘static’ is necessary in operator overloading in C#?

tried this article

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert/why-are-overloaded-operators-always-static-in-c

But could someone explain what the author is trying to say?

Answer 1

The author makes a simple cost/benefit analysis of a potential feature of operator overloading in a non-static way, and concludes that the benefits do not justify the costs: you can easily mimic the functionality of instance overloading of operators by dispatching to a virtual method from inside of a statically overloaded operator. However, the costs of letting you define overloaded operators without an intermediate virtual functions are great:

• You introduce asymmetry in the way your operators work (2+c may be illegal while c+2 is OK)
• You need to deal with null references on the left-hand side
• Single dispatch would not address your problem anyway, so you’d end up doing additional dispatch work inside the operator

At the end, the author notes that rather than introducing a feature that introduces much confusion without a significant benefit, they went for a cleaner design that can be extended to provide comparable levels of functionality.