Why should the assignment operator return a reference to the object?

Question

I\'m doing some revision of my C++, and I\'m dealing with operator overloading at the minute, specifically the \"=\"(assignment) operator. I was looking online and came acro

Answer 1

The return type doesn't matter when you're just performing a single assignment in a statement like this:

x = y;

It starts to matter when you do this:

if ((x = y)) {

... and really matters when you do this:

x = y = z;

That's why you return the current object: to allow chaining assignments with the correct associativity. It's a good general practice.