.net - What's the false operator in C# good for?

Question

There are two weird operators in C#:

• the true operator
• the false operator

If I understand this right these operators can be used in types which I want to use instead of a boolean expression and where I don't want to provide an implicit conversion to bool.

Let's say I have a following class:

    public class MyType
    {
        public readonly int Value;

        public MyType(int value)
        {
            Value = value;
        }

        public static bool operator true (MyType mt)
        {
            return  mt.Value > 0;
        }

        public static bool operator false (MyType mt)
        {
            return  mt.Value < 0;
        }

    }

So I can write the following code:

    MyType mTrue = new MyType(100);
    MyType mFalse = new MyType(-100);
    MyType mDontKnow = new MyType(0);

    if (mTrue)
    {
         // Do something.
    }

    while (mFalse)
    {
        // Do something else.
    }

    do
    {
        // Another code comes here.
    } while (mDontKnow)

However for all the examples above only the true operator is executed. So what's the false operator in C# good for?

Note: More examples can be found here, here and here.

Answer 1

You can use it to override the && and || operators.

The && and || operators can't be overridden, but if you override |, &, true and false in exactly the right way the compiler will call | and & when you write || and &&.

For example, look at this code (from http://ayende.com/blog/1574/nhibernate-criteria-api-operator-overloading - where I found out about this trick; archived version by @BiggsTRC):

public static AbstractCriterion operator &(AbstractCriterion lhs, AbstractCriterion rhs)
{
       return new AndExpression(lhs, rhs);
}

public static AbstractCriterion operator |(AbstractCriterion lhs, AbstractCriterion rhs)
{
       return new OrExpression(lhs, rhs);
}

public static bool operator false(AbstractCriterion criteria)
{
       return false;
}
public static bool operator true(AbstractCriterion criteria)
{
       return false;
}

This is obviously a side effect and not the way it's intended to be used, but it is useful.