Question

I am studying C++ now. I am trying to study it from this link. Here in the 10th chapter, when I study about operator overloading, in an example program “*this” is returned as a constant reference. Here it is

Here in this program we are dereferencing the current object using “*this” and returning the value means the current Counter object as constant reference.

So when I do like this:

Counter a = ++i;

is the current object assigned to a constant reference and the value of the constant reference is copied to the new object created using default copy constructor ?

Answer 1

When you write

Counter a = ++i;

You’re simply copying from the const Counter & being returned from the function. What you’re doing is equivalent to (from the point of view of a):

const Counter & ref = ++i;
Counter a = ref;

As long as you define a to be a Counter object, it will be created as a brand new Counter object (Or you will get a compiler error if the copy-constructor is not accessible).