Friends and Operator Overloading

This chapter will continue our pursuit of expanding your C++ programming repertoire beyond OOP concepts, with the goal of writing more extensible code. We will next explore friend functions, friend classes, and operator overloading in C++. We will understand how operator overloading can extend operators beyond their usage with standard types to behave uniformly with user defined types, and why this is a powerful OOP tool. We will learn how friend functions and classes can be safely used to achieve this goal.

In this chapter, we will cover the following main topics:

• Understanding friend functions and friend classes, appropriate reasons to utilize, and measures to add safety to their usage
• Learning about operator overloading essentials – how and why to overload operators, ensuring operators are polymorphic between standard and user defined types
• Implementing operator functions and knowing when friends may be necessary

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