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In this section of the course, we’ll learn about overloading operators in c++.

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C++ allows the programmer to overload most operators to work with user-defined classes.

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This is intended to make code more readable and writable

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by allowing the use of familiar operators in a familiar manner,

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but with our own classes and objects.

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First look at exactly what operator overloading is

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and some of the basic rules that C++ enforces.

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We’ll start with the assignment operator.

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The assignment operators a very important operator in C++.

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It defines the semantics of what happens when you assigned one object to another.

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C++  provides a default way of doing object assignment

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much as it did with the copy constructor that we learned about in the last section.

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However, many times we want to be in control of what happens during object assignment,

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and we can overload the assignment operator to do exactly that.

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For example, when we use raw pointers in our classes,

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we must provide our own version of the assignment operator.

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Additionally, we could override the assignment operator to handle both

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copy and move semantics as we did with the copy

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and move constructors in the last section.

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We will learn how to do that in this section.

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We’ll also see how we can overload other operators as both member functions

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and its global functions, and why do we want to choose one over the other.

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We’ll finish up this section by overloading the stream insertion and extraction operator

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so that we can easily use our objects with c++ streams

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just like we've been doing with the built-in types.

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So let's get started with operator overloading.