>
>AFAIK, there's no point in using a StringBuilder for something like this:

string s = "Tom" + "Dick"+"Harry"+"AsManyMoreAsYouLike"

since you are only assigning to a string once. But, since strings are immutable, if you do this:

string s = "Tom";
>s += "Dick";
>s += "Harry";

then you are, in effect, creating a new 's' and discarding the old one with every addition. In that situation using a StingBuilder comes into its own....


I'm not so sure, Viv

To me the two above result in pretty much the same, where the first does not assign the intermediate results to s, but the intermediate results are 'calculated' in both cases

Explanation

The + operator is a binary operator, ie takes two operands

The reason that we can write

string s = "Tom" + "Dick"+"Harry"+"AsManyMoreAsYouLike;

is that there is something like associativity which is a convenient way to drop the parentheses.
I take it that the + operator is left associative, so the expression boils down to

string s = ( ( ("Tom" + "Dick")+"Harry" ) +"AsManyMoreAsYouLike ) ;

In prefix notation

string s = +( +(  +("Tom", "Dick"), "Harry") , "AsManyMoreAsYouLike)

Which means that in the above case the + operator will be called 3 times with two operands. So it must return intermediate results, which will be stored on the heap since string is a reference type

The two intermediate results
"TomDick" and "TomDickHarry" will be collected later