Use operator overloading to reuse operators
There are lots of operators that are provided for us by C++. However, sometimes we need to overload these operators so that we can use them on data structures that we create ourselves. Of course, we can overload the operators to change the meaning as well. For example, we can change + (plus) to behave like - (minus), but this is not recommended as this usually does not serve any purpose or help us in any way. Also, it may confuse other programmers who are using the same code base.
Getting ready
You need to have a working copy of Visual Studio installed on your Windows machine.
How to do it…
In this recipe, we will see how we can overload an operator and which operators are allowed to be overloaded in C++.
- Open Visual Studio.
- Create a new C++ project.
- Select Win32 Console Application.
- Add a source file called
Source.cpp
,vector3.h
, andvector3.cpp
. - Add the following lines of code to
Source.cpp
:#include "vector3.h" #include <conio.h>...