Question

Is there any way to overload the > (greater than) operator, to be able to do something like:

myClass *a = new myClass(1);
myClass *b = new myClass(3);

if(a > b) //it should compare the int values from the constructors
  //do something

I’ve tried overloading the operator, but got various errors. I am using VC++.

Answer 1

You cannot overload operators for pointers, because they are primitive types (and you cannot create an overload where both arguments are primitive types); instead, you can overload the operators for your objects of user-defined types (not pointer to them):

class myClass
{
    // ...
public:
    bool operator>(const myClass & right) const
    {
        return this->whatever()>right.whatever();
    }
};

myClass *a = new myClass(1);
myClass *b = new myClass(3);

if(*a > *b) //it should compare the int values from the constructors
  //do something

notice that, if you don’t have a particular reason to allocate stuff on the heap, it’s much better to just allocate it on the stack:

myClass a(1);
myClass b(3);
if(a > b)
    // do something