For commercial / enterprise apps this just strikes me as seven shades of badness just waiting to creep up on you when you least expect it.

It falls into the basket of features that I would barely trust myself to use correctly let alone some poor intern.

Not sure - you’re the ex Microsoftie aren’t you? You should be telling me (or pulling strings) ;-)
I’d definitely put it forward if there was a place for me to do that. Is Connect that place?

Andrew

Same with your suggestion - C & C++ got away with that sort of solution because they were loosely typed and could convert pointers and most other types into bools. C# is much stronger in the typing department and to get it to make sense of that kind of formation would require a loosening of the type safety of the language, which I for one wouldn’t like to see.

besides, I like the idea of being able to do it in one line!

Andrew

if (a && a.Address && a.Address.FirstLine)
x = a.Address.FirstLine;

simple.

that first one would never get off the ground - they’d have to change the logic of the compiler to ignore the interpretation of the second term in the expression as a bool, and to convert it to a more complex structure during compile time. How would you ever know which interpretation the user really wanted?

The second one would make sense and could be complemented by all the other mathematical inequalities for <= & >= etc

Andrew

I’d also like:
if (a == Blah.Foo || a == Blah.Bar)
To become:
if (a == Blah.Foo || Blah.Bar)

And:
if (a > min && a < max)
To:
if (min < a < max)