Is @ inside razor syntax called operator?

Question

I just bought a book on ASP.NET MVC With Razor View Engine. There is a subsection called Usage of @ Operator and this subsection title makes me ... well, uncomfortable.

Is @ inside the razor view engine called operator?

UPDATE

I guess my question is not so clear. I want to know if @ is an operator inside the razor view engine. For example, < > = != >= => these are called as operator inside C# language. Is it same for @ inside Razor view engine?

Answer 1

I think the reason for you discomfort is that the @ token (when talking about it from a parsing perspective, though the word character should also do) is overloaded to indicate a number of different situations. Let's examine what those are:

• Write a value to the output:

  @this.Value
  

• Indicate a code block transition:

  @{
      var foo = 1;
      foo += 1;
  }
  

• Indicate a code statement transition:

  <div>
  @if(foo) {
       // code
  }
  </div>
  

• Indicate an escape to markup till the end of the line

  @if(foo) {
      foo = false;
      @: value printed to output
  }
  

• Indicate directive statements:

  @inherits MyCustomBaseType
  

• Indicate special code blocks:

  @section Foo {
      <div />
  }
  
  @helper Bar(int param) {
      param += 1;
  }
  

• Delimit comment blocks:

  @*
     This is a comment
  *@
  

• Escape the @ character:

  Email me at myemail@@example.com
  

In my opinion only the first usage can be considered as an operator. The operand (i.e. everything else that follows the @ up to but excluding the first markup-significant whitespace character) is passed as the parameter to the Write() method. All other usages don't have any clearly identifiable operands or require additional tokens (the * in the comment block, etc) to be indentified.

Answer 2

According to the official pages on Razor, you can find one example here, it does not seem that this is called an operator.

From the linked page:

You add code to a page using the @ character

(my emphasis)

I also found numerous other pages on that same site, all referring it to just the "@ character", so in that sense it isn't considered an operator.

<opinion>

However, if you read on Wikipedia on the topic of operators, then:

Syntactically operators usually contrast to functions. In most languages, functions may be seen as a special form of prefix operator with fixed precedence level and associativity, often with compulsory parentheses e.g. Func(a) (or (Func a) in LISP). Most languages support programmer-defined functions, but cannot really claim to support programmer-defined operators, unless they have more than prefix notation and more than a single precedence level. Semantically operators can be seen as special form of function with different calling notation and a limited number of parameters (usually 1 or 2).

(again, my emphasis)

Then I would argue that @ is in fact an operator. It is a symbol with a specific meaning, and you could argue that you're "escaping out of the surrounding context to do something else", sort of like a function call.

In other words, while the word operator does not appear in the website articles I've seen so far, I would consider it to be an operator nonetheless.

</opinion>