Operator overloading is just “syntactic sugar,” which means it is simply another way for you to make a function call.

The difference is that the arguments for this function don’t appear inside parentheses, but instead they surround or are next to characters you’ve always thought of as immutable operators.

There are two differences between the use of an operator and an ordinary function call. The syntax is different; an operator is often “called” by placing it between or sometimes after the arguments. The second difference is that the compiler determines which “function” to call. For instance, if you are using the operator + with floating-point arguments, the compiler “calls” the function to perform floating-point addition (this “call” is typically the act of inserting in-line code, or a floating-point-processor instruction). If you use operator + with a floating-point number and an integer, the compiler “calls” a special function to turn the int into a float, and then “calls” the floating-point addition code.

But in C++, it’s possible to define new operators that work with classes. This definition is just like an ordinary function definition except that the name of the function consists of the keyword operator followed by the operator. That’s the only difference, and it becomes a function like any other function, which the compiler calls when it sees the appropriate pattern.