Hi,

I need to finish a assignment on operator overloading but this one piece of code doesnt seem to make sense..

in my int main() i have

int main()
{

Element a, b(5), c(7), d;
cout << (5+b) << endl;

this is just part of it, I have already implemented the overloading functions
but from my understanding the overloading operators of class works eg:

a + b would be a.operator+(b) but then how can 5+b be 5.operator+(b) since 5 is a int.
Please can same one help?

Thanks

>>a + b would be a.operator+(b) but then how can 5+b be 5.operator+(b) since 5 is a int.

You're wrong. Although you can make an overloaded operator as a member function (i.e. a.operator+(b)), that's not the preferred way, normally it is implemented as a free-function. As so:

// this will cover the ( a + b ) case:
Element operator + (const Element& a, const Element& b);

// this will cover the ( 5 + b ) case:
Element operator + (int a, const Element& b);

// this will cover the ( a + 5 ) case:
Element operator + (const Element& a, int b);

Overloaded operators should almost always be implemented as (friend) free-functions, not as member functions. The only exception to that rule is for the operators that cannot be implemented as free-functions, like assignment operators and a few others.

Thank you very much! That was very helpful. Now I can continue my assignment with confidence!

My compiler keeps saying that 'Element Element::operator+(int, const Element&) can only take one or no parameters

I think the problem is that you've declared it as a member function. Make sure the function is written as Mike said, e.g.

Element operator + (int a, const Element& b)  // note: not "Element::operator +"
{
    Element return_val;
    // make return_val be the sum of a and b
    return return_val;
}

and declare the function to be a friend of your class:

class Element {
    public:
        ...
        friend Element operator + (int a, Element & b);
        ...
};

Do the same for all three versions of your operator+.

I did that too... gcc compiler still says that the function can only take one or no argument

please post the code you are using right now

It works now, the problem was that I kept implementing it with Element:: making the friend functions part of the class Element which was obviously incorrect. I blindly missed the point raptr_dflo and mike where stating. 100% solved.
Thanks guys

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