Question

I have the following declaration to distinct that it uses different operations in my code:

typedef unsigned int SOMEIDTYPE;

Now when i create two overloaded functions:

string something(const unsigned int &val){ ... itoa(val) ... }
string something(const SOMEIDTYPE &val){ ... IDTABLE[val] ... }

I get error: error C2084: function 'std::string something(const unsigned int &)' already has a body

So, How can i overload this function to use those two different datatypes distinctively, and perform different operations as seen above?

Edit: The reason for overloading is that i am calling this function inside a template function.

Answer 1

A typedef only creates a nickname — it doesn’t create a new type.

If you really want to do something like this, then you need to create a new type. You could create a class for this purpose, but in order for that class to behave like an int, you’d need to do some work:

class SOMEIDTYPE
{
public:
  SOMEIDTYPE();
  SOMEIDTYPE(const int&);
  SOMEIDTYPE& operator=(const SOMEIDTYPE&);
  operator int() const;
private:
  int val_;
};

Now you can overload on SOMEIDTYPE