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Thinking in C++
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Operators you can’t overload

There are certain operators in the available set that cannot be overloaded. The general reason for the restriction is safety. If these operators were overloadable, it would somehow jeopardize or break safety mechanisms, make things harder, or confuse existing practice.

  • The member selection operator.. Currently, the dot has a meaning for any member in a class, but if you allow it to be overloaded, then you couldn’t access members in the normal way; instead you’d have to use a pointer and the arrow operator->.
  • The pointer to member dereference operator.*, for the same reason as operator..
  • There’s no exponentiation operator. The most popular choice for this was operator** from Fortran, but this raised difficult parsing questions. Also, C has no exponentiation operator, so C++ didn’t seem to need one either because you can always perform a function call. An exponentiation operator would add a convenient notation, but no new language functionality to account for the added complexity of the compiler.
  • There are no user-defined operators. That is, you can’t make up new operators that aren’t currently in the set. Part of the problem is how to determine precedence, and part of the problem is an insufficient need to account for the necessary trouble.
  • You can’t change the precedence rules. They’re hard enough to remember as it is without letting people play with
    Thinking in C++
    Prev Contents / Index Next

 
 
   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire