CSharp - Inheritance as operator

Introduction

as operator performs a downcast that evaluates to null rather than throwing an exception if the downcast fails:

Suppose we have the following class

class Shape{
       public string Name;
}

class Circle : Shape   // inherits from Shape
{
       public long Radius;
}

class Square : Shape   // inherits from Shape
{
       public decimal Width;
}

For the following code

Shape a = new Shape();
Circle s = a as Circle;       // s is null; no exception thrown

This is useful when you're going to subsequently test whether the result is null:

if (s != null) 
   Console.WriteLine (s.Radius);

CSharp - Inheritance as operator

Introduction

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