Operator Overloading

In object-oriented programming, operator overloading—less commonly known as 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 the language, the programmer, or both.

Operator overloading is claimed to be useful because it allows the developer to program using notation "closer to the target domain" and allows user-defined types a similar level of syntactic support as types built into the language. It can easily be emulated using function calls; for an example, consider the integers a, b, c:

In a language that supports operator overloading, and assuming the '*' operator has higher precedence than '+', this is effectively a more concise way of writing: