Question

I’ve overloaded the [] (square brackets) operator of a simple class in C++ to return an integer from an array. I now what to reuse this overloaded operator in a member function. I am having trouble implementing this, as using *this[ i ] apparently does not work, although I can reference the operator directly:

int & A::operator [] (size_t i)
{

    return ints[ i ];

}
...
int A::getVal ( size_t i) const
{

  // Does not work
  return *this[ i ];

  // Does work
  // return operator []( i );

}

Why is it that dereferencing the pointer this and using the operator [] results in a compile error but calling the operator directly works?

I get the following error compiling:

cannot convert from ‘const Array’ to ‘char’

Thank you for any input.

Answer 1

Why is it that dereferencing the pointer this and using the operator
[] results in a compile error

It doesn’t. But you have to spell it right. Change

return *this[ i ];

to

return (*this)[ i ];

As originally written, it applies [i] to this, then dereferences the result.