Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Overloading Operators

In Chapter 4 you learned about operators offered by the Visual Basic grammar. Although Visual Basic does not enable creating new custom operators, it offers the possibility of overloading existing operators. In other words, you have the ability to extend existing operators with custom versions. You might wonder when and why this could be necessary. You get an answer to this question with the following code. Consider the simple structure that represents a three-dimensional coordinate:

Now imagine that, for any reason, you want to sum two instances of the structure using the + operator. If you try and write the following ...