Operator Overloading?

The point is you can write code that makes sense by using the operators. If you create your own string class, you can concatenate strings using the + operator. If you create an arbitrary sized integer class, you can write the +, -, *, /, etc. operators for it. If you didn''t do that, you would have to do something like:

BigInt a = 2134325423652364565324543252;
BigInt b = 23423456324566;
BigInt c = add(a,b);

Instead, since you can overload operators, you can do this:

BigInt c = a + b;

That is much more clear to a C/C++ programmer. You could also overload the input and output stream operators for your class. So you could do this:

cin >> a >> b;
c = a + b;

I don''t know of any case that they are necessary, but it''s cool to be able to use them with iostream stuff instead of calling a function like, display_big_int(BigInt & b), or whatever.

When doing vector math, you don''t have to do:

a.add(b).multiply(c)

You can do
(a+b)*c

And in cout you can do
cout << "blee" << x;

instead of
cout.print("blee").print(x);

etc

So you can code "a operator b" rather than "func(a,b)" or "a.func(b)". Or in more elaborate situation "a + b + c + d" rather than "a.sum(b.sum(c.sum(d)))" or "sum(a,sum(b,sum(c,d)))".