Question

Suppose I have this class:

class Int{
    private:
        int x;
    public:
        Int(int i) : x(i) {}
};

Can I build a prefix + operator to write expression such x = + a b?

I tried to overload operator+ inside the class but the compiler complain that operator+ must be unary or binary and not ternary.

Is there a way to do such thing?

Answer 1

You can’t change the way that the ‘+’ character is interpreted by the compiler – it has special syntactic significance. If you’re willing to give up the + symbol, though, you could create a class called plus and overload operator() to take its following arguments.

Essentially, you’re creating a dsl using the plus class as a proxy for the + operator.