Operator Overloading and <<

There are two operators that are common to many object types: << and =. << converts the object to some reasonable string representation so it can be outputted, and = is used to copy objects.

When you output an object using cout, C++ checks to see whether you have provided a << definition for that object. If it can't find one, it will refuse to compile and give an error such as

Here is what << might look like for the Complex class:

Whenever you pass an object to an output stream such as cout, C++ invokes the << operator on that object and outputs the result. In this case, the output is 1 + 2i.

The return type for << is ostream&, which is the datatype of a cout object. By returning the os object (which, like ostream, is just an abbreviation of output stream), you can string together multiple << commands such as

To illustrate why that's a good thing, consider what you would be forced to do if you didn't return the ostream object:

Because the first example allows stringing << statements together, all the display code fits easily on one line. The output from both statements is the same, displaying "Your two numbers are 3 + 2i and 1 + 5i".

This version of << does not look good if the imaginary part is negative. As an exercise, fix it.