What's this syntax called? SomeMoneyFormat f = "€ 5,00";

Question

I have seen some form of this some time ago, but I cannot recall what it was called, and therefore have no clue on how to implement something like this:

SomeMoneyFormat f = "€ 5,00";

Which calls some overload function that can parse the string into a SomeMoneyFormat object.

Answer 1

When you do not specify that it should be cast it is an implicit cast

   public static implicit operator SomeMoneyFormat(string d) 
   {
      return new SomeMoneyFormat(d);
   }

Then € 5,00 is passed as the string d

more about this here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z5z9kes2(VS.71).aspx

Also, I can add that this should only be done when there is no risk of losing data. For example converting a double to an int will lose some precision, so it is an explicit cast. Otherwise it would be easy to cast by accident and lose data.

Answer 2

Looks like an implicit type conversion to me.