Is it possible to to cascade overloaded extraction operator with overloaded arithmetic operators?

Question

I am trying to implement a class COMPLEX in C++ and overload the arithmetic operators as well as the '<<' and '>>' operators for input/output. Individually and also when cascaded the arithmetic operators work as expected - but i am unable to obtain correct results when trying to execute statements such as:

cout &lt&lt "something" &lt&lt complex1 + complex2 &lt&lt "\n";

where complex1 and complex2 are objects of the class COMPLEX.

snippets of class definition:

class COMPLEX{
    int a;  // Real part
    int b;  // Imaginary part
public:
    COMPLEX operator = (COMPLEX );
    COMPLEX operator + (COMPLEX ) const;
    friend istream& operator &gt&gt (istream &, COMPLEX &);
    friend ostream& operator &lt&lt (ostream &, COMPLEX &);
-snip-
}


COMPLEX COMPLEX::operator = (COMPLEX t_c) {
    return COMPLEX(a = t_c.a, b = t_c.b);
}

COMPLEX COMPLEX::operator + (COMPLEX t_c) const{
    return COMPLEX(a + t_c.a, b + t_c.b);
}

istream& operator &gt&gt (istream &i_s, COMPLEX &t_c){
    i_s &gt&gt t_c.a &gt&gt t_c.b;
    return i_s;
}

ostream& operator &lt&lt (ostream &o_s, COMPLEX &t_c){
    o_s &lt&lt t_c.a &lt&lt "+" &lt&lt t_c.b &lt&lt "i";
    return o_s;
}

apart from this i have also overloaded operator.

When ever i try to cascade << with any other overloaded operator, the overloaded << friend function is not getting called. Instead the operator is getting called and the result of that is being displayed.

Answer 1

The problem is that your stream insertion operator is defined as

friend ostream& operator << (ostream &, COMPLEX &);

This takes a non-const reference to a COMPLEX object as the second parameter. When you try writing

cout << a + b << endl;

The value of a + b is an rvalue, not an lvalue, because it's the value returned by the function operator +. In C++, you cannot bind a reference to an rvalue, since then you could do Bad Things like this:

COMPLEX& c = a + b; // This step isn't legal
c = 137;            // Wait, what object did we just change?

The problem here is that if we can bind the reference c to the temporary object returned by a + b, then we could use the reference to make changes to that object. But this doesn't make any sense - a + b is the value of an expression, not an actual object.

This is the same problem that's going on here. Your operator << function can't take a + b as a second parameter because a + b is an rvalue.

To fix this, you can change operator << to take const reference to a COMPLEX:

friend ostream& operator<< (ostream& out, const COMPLEX& c);

This works because in C++ you can bind const references to rvalues. The rationale behind this is that if you have a const reference to a temporary, you can't make any changes to that temporary object, so the above example with binding a reference to a + b is no longer a problem.

In general, any overloaded operator that takes in a parameter whose type is another instance of the class that doesn't modify that instance should take its parameter by const reference. This goes for things like operator =, operator +, etc. because it avoids this problem.

Answer 2

Your operator << needs to take a constant reference, otherwise, the compiler will not be able to cast a temporary of type COMPLEX (which results from the addition) into a non-const reference, and might look for an alternative operator << to call.

friend ostream& operator << (ostream &, const COMPLEX &); //notice "const"

To understand the rest of the operator mechanics, you only need to take a look at the operator precedence table.

Answer 3

rewrite your cout statement to

cout << "something" << (complex1 + complex2) << "\n";

Answer 4

Your problem is that operator<< is always called before operator+. The fact that you provide overloads doesn't change this.

On the other hand, you generally shouldn't mix computations an I/O anyway (perhaps only to save some typing), because that makes it hard to see the order of your computations.