The overloaded ++ and – – operators present a dilemma because you want to be able to call different functions depending on whether they appear before (prefix) or after (postfix) the object they’re acting upon. The solution is simple, but people sometimes find it a bit confusing at first. When the compiler sees, for example, ++a (a pre-increment), it generates a call to operator++(a); but when it sees a++, it generates a call to operator++(a, int). That is, the compiler differentiates between the two forms by making calls to different overloaded functions. In OverloadingUnaryOperators.cpp for the member function versions, if the compiler sees ++b, it generates a call to B::operator++( ); if it sees b++ it calls B::operator++(int).

All the user sees is that a different function gets called for the prefix and postfix versions. Underneath, however, the two functions calls have different signatures, so they link to two different function bodies. The compiler passes a dummy constant value for the int argument (which is never given an identifier because the value is never used) to generate the different signature for the postfix version.