Question

C++ class: Please answer the below question in paragraph format.

There are several object-oriented languages that do not support operator overloading. Discuss the role and the importance of operator loading for the design of a class.

Discuss what the “this” pointer provides to programming and the role it plays in operator overloading.

Answer 1

Operator Overloading is the process of defining the way in which the computations on objects is done when an operation using an operator is applied on them. e.g: Suppose there is a class Set which stores set of numbers. So, if there are two objects ob1 and ob2 and if we want to add them, how will we do it because the + operator is defined for data types like integer, double , float etc. But not for a user defined class. In order to solve this issue, we can overload the operator + and define what computations must be done when we do

ob1 + ob2

So, we need operator overloading to define the behaviour of the operator and how the operation will be done.

The structure of operator overloading function is

// replace + with other operators like * , / , - , == , < , > etc

return_type operator+( ClassName& ob2 )

{

    // computations to be done on the objects of class

}

this pointer in C++ is used to refer to the class variables or the methods. These are mainly used to differentiate between class variables and other local variables with the same name as the class variables.

e.g:

class Student

{

    string name;

    int age;

   

    public:

   

        // the arguments have the same name as class variables

        Student(string name , int age)

        {

            // this->name refer to the class variable

            this->name = name;

           

            // this->age refer to the class variable

            this->age = age;

        }

}