Overloading Arithmetic Operators

Question

The assignment operator can be declared as

T& operator= (const t&);

in a class, but the arithmetic operators cannot be defined that way. It has to be fri

Answer 1

They ideally should be globals and not necessarily friends, so that you can write:

yourtype v = 1;
yourtype w = 1 + v;

Since, 1 is not an object of yourtype, if the operator+ were a member it would throw a fit. However, making it global makes it convert the 1 to yourtype and then perform the operation. Making it a friend helps to extract and manipulate the members of yourtype as required -- though not required. As an example: You can implement the member function operator+= and use it in the implementation of the operator+.