Question

I’m 99% sure the answer to this is ‘no dice’, but I’ll try anyway…

I’m trying to override operator[].

I know how to override it for invocations on a given type:

struct Huh {
    int x;
    int operator[](float idx) { return -1; }
};

Huh h;
cout << h[123.4f] << end;  // works, spits out -1

But what if I want to change the way I subscript an array of these types:

Huh h[10];
Huh h2 = h[123.4f];  // invalid!!

It appears this is a non-changeable C++ behavior. That is, the operator[] for type “Huh[10]” (or any array type) is off-limits.

Or, is there some way to define operator[] for an arrayed type?

I tried making operator[] a free function only to discover that’s disallowed in C++. Any other ideas?

Answer 1

No dice. You can’t overload a “pointer to an object”s methods, as a pointer is not an object with operators to be overloaded.