Polymorphism |
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Ad hoc polymorphism |
Parametric polymorphism |
Subtyping |
In computer programming, operator overloading, sometimes termed operator ad hoc polymorphism, is a specific case of polymorphism, where different operators have different implementations depending on their arguments. Operator overloading is generally defined by a programming language, a programmer, or both.
Operator overloading is syntactic sugar, and is used because it allows programming using notation nearer to the target domain[1] and allows user-defined types a similar level of syntactic support as types built into a language. It is common, for example, in scientific computing, where it allows computing representations of mathematical objects to be manipulated with the same syntax as on paper.
In computer programming, operator overloading, sometimes termed operator ad hoc polymorphism, is a specific case of polymorphism, where different operators have different implementations depending on their arguments. Operator overloading is generally defined. The operand expr of a built-in prefix increment or decrement operator must be a modifiable (non-const) lvalue of non-boolean (since C17) arithmetic type or pointer to completely-defined object type.For non-boolean operands, the expression x is exactly equivalent to x + = 1, and the expression -x is exactly equivalent to x -= 1, that is, the prefix increment or decrement is an lvalue.
Operator overloading does not change the expressive power of a language (with functions), as it can be emulated using function calls. For example, consider variables a, b, c
of some user-defined type, such as matrices:
a + b * c
In a language that supports operator overloading, and with the usual assumption that the '*' operator has higher precedence than '+' operator, this is a concise way of writing:
Add(a, Multiply(b, c))
However, the former syntax reflects common mathematical usage.
In this case, the addition operator is overloaded to allow addition on a user-defined type 'Time' (in C++):
Addition is a binary operation, which means it has two operands. In C++, the arguments being passed are the operands, and the temp
object is the returned value.
The operation could also be defined as a class method, replacing lhs
by the hidden this
argument; however this forces the left operand to be of type Time
:
Note that a unary operator defined as a class method would receive no apparent argument (it only works from this
):
Less than(<) operator is often overloaded to sort a structure or class.
In the last example, operator overloading is done within the class which is the same as the previous examples. In C++, after overloading the less-than operator (<), standard sorting functions can be used to sort some classes.
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Operator overloading has often been criticized[2] because it allows programmers to reassign the semantics of operators depending on the types of their operands. For example, the use of the <<
in C++'s:
shifts the bits in the variable a left by 1 bit if a is of an integer type, but if a is an output stream then the above code will attempt to write a '1' to the stream. Because operator overloading allows the original programmer to change the usual semantics of an operator and to catch any subsequent programmers by surprise, it is considered good practice to use operator overloading with care (the creators of Java decided not to use this feature,[3] although not necessarily for this reason).
Another, more subtle, issue with operators is that certain rules from mathematics can be wrongly expected or unintentionally assumed. For example, the commutativity of + (i.e. that a + b b + a
) does not always apply; an example of this occurs when the operands are strings, since + is commonly overloaded to perform a concatenation of strings (i.e. 'bird' + 'song'
yields 'birdsong'
, while 'song' + 'bird'
yields 'songbird'
). A typical counter[citation needed] to this argument comes directly from mathematics: While + is commutative on integers (and more generally any complex numbers), it is not commutative for other 'types' of variable. In practice, + is not associative even with floating-point values, due to rounding errors. Another example: In mathematics, multiplication is commutative for real and complex numbers but not commutative in matrix multiplication.
A classification of some common programming languages is made according to whether their operators are overloadable by the programmer and whether the operators are limited to a predefined set.
Operators | Not overloadable | Overloadable |
---|---|---|
New definable[4] |
|
|
Limited set |
|
|
The ALGOL 68 specification allowed operator overloading.[29]
Extract from the ALGOL 68 language specification (page 177) where the overloaded operators ¬, =, ≠, and abs are defined:
Note that no special declaration is needed to overload an operator, and the programmer is free to create new operators.
Ada supports overloading of operators from its inception, with the publication of the Ada 83 language standard. However, the language designers chose to preclude the definition of new operators. Only extant operators in the language may be overloaded, by defining new functions with identifiers such as '+', '*', '&' etc. Subsequent revisions of the language (in 1995 and 2005) maintain the restriction to overloading of extant operators.
In C++, operator overloading is more refined than in ALGOL 68.[30]
Java language designers at Sun Microsystems chose to omit overloading.[31][32][33]
Ruby allows operator overloading as syntactic sugar for simple method calls.
Lua allows operator overloading as syntactic sugar for method calls with the added feature that if the first operand doesn't define that operator, the method for the second operand will be used.
Microsoft added operator overloading to C# in 2001 and to Visual Basic .NET in 2003.
Scala treats all operators as methods and thus allows operator overloading by proxy.
In Raku, the definition of all operators is delegated to lexical functions, and so, using function definitions, operators can be overloaded or new operators added. For example, the function defined in the Rakudo source for incrementing a Date object with '+' is:
Since 'multi' was used, the function gets added to the list of multidispatch candidates, and '+' is only overloaded for the case where the type constraints in the function signature are met.While the capacity for overloading includes +, *, >=, the postfix and term i, and so on, it also allows for overloading various brace operators: '[x, y]', 'x[ y ]', 'x{ y }', and 'x( y )'.
Kotlin has supported operator overloading since its creation.
One of the nicest features of C++ OOP is that you can overload operators to handle objects of your classes (you can't do this in some other OOP-centric languages, like Java).
In the C++programming language, the assignment operator, =
, is the operator used for assignment. Like most other operators in C++, it can be overloaded.
The copy assignment operator, often just called the 'assignment operator', is a special case of assignment operator where the source (right-hand side) and destination (left-hand side) are of the same class type. It is one of the special member functions, which means that a default version of it is generated automatically by the compiler if the programmer does not declare one. The default version performs a memberwise copy, where each member is copied by its own copy assignment operator (which may also be programmer-declared or compiler-generated).
The copy assignment operator differs from the copy constructor in that it must clean up the data members of the assignment's target (and correctly handle self-assignment) whereas the copy constructor assigns values to uninitialized data members.[1] For example:
The language permits an overloaded assignment operator to have an arbitrary return type (including void
). However, the operator is usually defined to return a reference to the assignee. This is consistent with the behavior of assignment operator for built-in types (returning the assigned value) and allows for using the operator invocation as an expression, for instance in control statements or in chained assignment. Also, the C++ Standard Library requires this behavior for some user-supplied types.[2]
When deep copies of objects have to be made, exception safety should be taken into consideration. One way to achieve this when resource deallocation never fails is:
However, if a no-fail (no-throw) swap function is available for all the member subobjects and the class provides a copy constructor and destructor (which it should do according to the rule of three), the most straightforward way to implement copy assignment is as follows:[3]
C++ supports assignment between different classes, both via implicit copy constructor and assignment operator, if the destination instance class is the ancestor of the source instance class:
Copying from ancestor to descendant objects, which could leave descendant's fields uninitialized, is not permitted.