Operation assignment (.= assignment operator)

[staa99]

Hi everyone,

I have run a web search trying to find out whether this feature already exists or if there's some discussion around it. However, I couldn't find anything. As a result, I'd love to submit a request to add compound operation assignment to c#. Unfortunately, I don't know of any languages that already support this feature and I understand that this might be as a result of certain complications.

Basically, what this feature represents is this:

value = value.operate()
// is equivalent to 
value .= operate()
// where operate returns the same type as value.

A common use-case is in LINQ queries, when you might have this or some equivalent

enumerable = enumerable.Where(condition);

This can then be replaced by

enumerable .= Where(condition);

This use-case is very common and I believe this feature increases code clarity and reduces amount of code written, therefore improving developer productivity.

[staa99]

I originally intended to post this on

https://github.com/dotnet/csharplang

as a c# feature, but thanks to Github's related issues, I was finally able to find issue 500, which proposed the same feature and which showed that it was considered a bad practice to change the meanings of variables after assignment.

I agree with this, however, I'd like to keep a discussion open in case you have contrary opinions I can learn from