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Why overload operators?

Mykonine

I've always wondered why people would want to override operators. It's one of those pet peeves of mine. Overriding an explicit cast operator might make sense, but why overload them when you can simply use them in a named method? To me it seems that simply having a named method "Foo.Add" is no less efficient than overriding the + operator.

2 Replies

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pseudobill200422y ago
Actually, your first title was right - it's nearly always referred to as overloading, not overriding. I know what you mean - I never overload operators. I just want to have it figured out in case I'm looking at someone else's code, but I don't see it as being very valuable (other than the extremely worn-out example of complex numbers...).
+1
Mykonine22y ago
Oops, the topic title was a misnomer. Should be "Why override operators?"
+1