Why does “a”=“a” return False

Question

The expression "a"="a" returns False . What the heck is going on?

Edit : Sorry, I'm working in VB.NET, not C#

Update : When I copy the expression into Notepad++, it shows "?a"="a" . Can it have something to do with encoding?

Answer 1

That expression is not legal C#.

You aren't getting an error because the FuncEval (the ability to execute code in the watch or immediate windows) uses a different parser with various issues.

These issues may eventually be fixed by replacing this parser with Roslyn.

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EDIT

I suspect that the VB.Net parser used by FuncEval doesn't intern strings.

\n

If you run this expression outside of FuncEval (eg, LINQPad), it returns true.

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Second EDIT

You have an unprintable character in the first string.

Notepad++ shows it as a ? because your text file is using an encoding that doesn't support the character.
To find out what it actually is, paste it into this site .