Overloading Operator for Pre and Post Increment

This inquiry delves into the feasibility of overloading the operator to facilitate both pre-increment and post-increment operations. In pre-increment (SampleObject ), the object is incremented before its value is returned. Post-increment ( SampleObject) increments the object and returns its original value.

Implementing these operations through operator overloading requires understanding the limitations of return types. While overloading based on return types may appear permissible, it poses an ambiguity problem. Operator overloading extends the functionality of built-in types to user-defined types. Yet, it remains unclear why pre and post increment cannot coexist for user-defined types.

To resolve this ambiguity, the postfix increment operator utilizes a dummy int parameter:

// Prefix
Sample& operator  ()
{
  // Increment logic on this instance; return reference to it.
  return *this;
}

// Postfix
Sample operator  (int)
{
  Sample tmp(*this);
  operator  (); // Prefix-increment this instance
  return tmp;   // Return value before increment
}

With this approach, the pre-increment operator returns a reference to the incremented object, while the post-increment operator returns a copy of the object prior to the increment operation.