Question

If overloading the dereferencing operator (operator*), does the member selection operator (operator->) use the overloaded operator or does one need to overload it aswell?

Answer 1

You will need to overload the arrow operator separately. More generally, even if there is a nice mapping between related operators in C++, if you overload one operator, you do not get the rest overloaded “for free” and must implement them yourself.

That said, it’s easy to implement arrow in terms of dereference:

T* Class::operator -> () const {
    return &**this;
}

This works by dereferencing this to get a reference to the receiver object, then dereferencing that to invoke operator *, then taking the address of the returned reference to get a pointer to the object the arrow should be applied to.

You may want to look into the Boost.Operators library, which makes it possible to define many logically related operators automatically from a small set of base operations.

Hope ths helps!