Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, fifth edition

Hour 15. Using Operator Overloading

What You’ll Learn in This Hour:

• How to overload operators in member functions

• How to overload the assignment operator to manage memory

• How to support classes with dynamically allocated variables

Operator Overloading

The built-in types in C++ work with operators such as addition (+) and multiplication (*), making it easy to use these types in expressions:

int x = 17, y = 12, z;z = x * (y + 5);

The C++ compiler knows to multiply and add integers when the * and + operators appear in an expression. The preceding code adds 5 to y, and then multiplies the result by x. The z integer is assigned the value 289.

A class could provide the same functionality with multiply() and add() member functions, but the ...