Comparison Functor Types vs. operator<

Question

In the Google C++ Style Guide, the section on Operator Overloading recommends against overloading any operators (\"except in rare, special circumstances\"). Specifi

Answer 1

Well, according to the webpage you cite, there's not much advantage for functors ("[operators] can fool our intuition into thinking that expensive operations are cheap, built-in operations.")

My felling is that one should strive to make you classes first-class objects as much as possible, which, to me, means having them understand as many operators as sensible.

It's been a while since I written a functor, but it would look something like this:

class MyClass {....}

class LessThanMyClass : std:binary_function
{
    public bool operator()(MyClass lhs, MyClass rhs) 
    {   return /* determine if lhs < rhs */ ; }
}

vector objs;
std::sort(objs.begin(), objs.end(), LessThanMyClass());

}