Re: [cadcdev-tiki] Operator Overloading

[Dan P. <ba...@al...>]

It's really not a quirk but sort of "behaves as designed". A pointer  
is a totally distinctive type from an object instance in C++. If you  
dereference it, it becomes an object reference. So yeah, you can't  
use operator<< on a pointer. :\ You might be able to do something  
like this though:

inline operator<<(ConsoleText *, foo) {
}

i.e. not part of a class. I'm not sure if that'll work but it might  
let you.

This example you gave is probably one of the reasons they added the  
'references' in C++ instead of just keeping pointers. That way you  
can basically pass pointers but you can treat them like objects. I  
just wish you could legally have null references and reassign them.

On Apr 27, 2006, at 8:53 PM, Sam Steele wrote:

> I ran into another C++ quirk while working on TikiSnake.  If you  
> look at the code, you'll see that I have to have my Drawable be an  
> actual object, not a pointer, otherwise C++ complains about my  
> overloaded << operator.  The following works fine:
>
> ConsoleText ct(blah);
>
> ct << "Hello world!";
>
> But the following doesn't:
>
> ConsoleText *ct = new ConsoleText(blah);
>
> ct << "Hello world!";
>
> /Users/sam/Projects/Console/src/snake.cpp:73: error: invalid  
> operands of types 'Tiki::GL::ConsoleText*' and 'const char [13]' to  
> binary 'operator<<'
>
> You can do:
>
> *ct << "Hello world";
>
> But the syntax looks a little quirky.
>
> Is there a way to tweak my declaration of the << operator to allow  
> it to work through a pointer?
>
> -Sam