C++ How to Program, 10/e

10.1 Introduction

This chapter shows how to enable C++’s operators to work with class objects—a process called operator overloading. One example of an overloaded operator built into C++ is <<, which is used both as the stream insertion operator and as the bitwise left-shift operator (which is discussed in Chapter 22). Similarly, >> also is overloaded; it’s used both as

• the stream extraction operator—defined via operator overloading in the C++ Standard Library—and

• the bitwise right-shift operator—defined as part of the C++ language.

You’ve been using overloaded operators since early in the book. Various overloads are built into the base C++ language itself. For example, C++ overloads the addition operator (+) and the subtraction operator ( ...