3 ms·

They picked that up from C++

• int_19h 5y ago
  They picked it up from Java, which also used == to mean both reference equality and value equality. But C# also tried to improve on Java. One of the things that the latter was commonly criticized for, was the need to use .equals() for strings for value comparisons - which is almost always what you want - and avoiding the more obvious ==. So they overloaded == for strings to mean value equality, while retaining them as reference types. IMO, the bigger mistake here was to keep strings as reference types - they really ought to be value types (the implementation can still wrap a reference to the actual string data internally, and share it between copies, but the client shouldn't be able to observe that).