Can I overload an operator in Objective-C?

Question

Is it possible to override operator use in Objective-C?

For example

myClassInstance + myClassInstance

calls a custom function to ad

Answer 1

I know this is an old question but I just wanted to leave this answer here for anybody in the future that might want to know if this is a possibility.

The answer is YES!

You'll have to use a variant of Objective-C called Objective-C++. As an example, say you created a new Objective-C command-line tool project. In order to allow C++ functionality, you'll need to rename "main.m" to "main.mm". Afterwards, you can mix C++ code in with your Objective-C code in the same file. There are some limitations, but I've tested operator overloading and it seems to work perfectly fine with Objective-C objects as far as I can tell. I've included sample source code to give you an idea of how to do it:

//main.mm
#import 
#include 
#include 

std::ostream &operator<<(std::ostream &os, NSString *s) {
    os << [s UTF8String];
    return os;
}

int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
    @autoreleasepool {

        NSString *str = @"I'm an NSString!";
        std::cout << str << std::endl;

    }
    return 0;
}

Here's my output after building and running this code:

I'm an NSString!
Program ended with exit code: 0

Hopefully this will be of help to somebody!