Practical C++

Chapter 14. Overloading Operators

<feature>

• Discover reasons for overloading operators

• Learn how an operator is like a function call

• Find out how to overload operators

• See some examples of operator overloading

</feature>

Why Overload Operators?

Operators form the basis of many expressions in C+ statements, working with the built-in C++ data types to aid us in writing code that’s easy to understand, modify, and maintain. Remember the overloaded Multiply() functions back in Chapter 8? Those functions were written to demonstrate how function overloading works, but they aren’t really very useful for real-world code. Imagine if you actually had to use functions like this to perform multiplication:

// z = x * y // int x = 5, y = 10; int z = Multiply(x, y); ...