Overloading assignment operator in C++

Question

As I\'ve understand, when overloading operator=, the return value should should be a non-const reference.

A& A::operator=( const A& )
{
    // check for sel         


        

Answer 1

A good general advice when overloading operators is 'do as primitive types do', and the default behavior of assignment to a primitive type is that.

Not returning anything could be an option, to disable assignment inside other expressions if you feel the need, but returning a copy does not make sense at all: if the caller wants to make a copy they can make it out of the reference, if they do not need the copy there is no need to generate a temporary that is not needed.