The C++ Programming Language, Fourth Edition

19. Special Operators

We are all special cases.

– Albert Camus

• Introduction

• Special Operators

Subscripting; Function Call; Dereferencing; Increment and Decrement; Allocation and Deallocation; User-Defined Literals

• A String Class

Essential Operations; Access to Characters; Representation; Member Functions; Helper Functions; Using Our String

• Friends

Finding Friends; Friends and Members

• Advice

19.1. Introduction

Overloading is not just for arithmetic and logical operations. In fact, operators are crucial in the design of containers (e.g., vector and map; §4.4), “smart pointers” (e.g., unique_ptr and shared_ptr; §5.2.1), iterators (§4.5), and other classes concerned with resource management.

19.2. Special Operators

The operators

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