Why are there no ||= or &&= operators in C#?

c# operators language-design assignment-operator compound-assignment
George Duckett picture George Duckett · Jun 14, 2011 · Viewed 11.3k times · Source

We have equivalent assignment operators for all Logical operators, Shift operators, Additive operators and all Multiplicative operators.

Why did the logical operators get left out? Is there a good technical reason why it is hard?

Answer

Eric Lippert picture Eric Lippert · Jun 14, 2011

Why did the logical operators get left out? Is there a good technical reason why it is hard?

They didn't. You can do &= or |= or ^= if you want.

bool b1 = false;
bool b2 = true;
b1 |= b2; // means b1 = b1 | b2

The || and && operators do not have a compound form because frankly, they're a bit silly. Under what circumstances would you want to say

b1 ||= b2;
b1 &&= b2;

such that the right hand side is not evaluated if the left hand side does not change? It seems like only a few people would actually use this feature, so why put it in?

For more information about the compound operators, see my serious article here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert/compound-assignment-part-one

and the follow-up April-Fools article here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/ericlippert/compound-assignment-part-two

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