FAQ 23.04 Is the goal of operator overloading to make the class easier to understand?

The goal is to help the users of a class rather than the developer of a class. There may be lots of users of a class, so this is an example of leverage: the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.

When programmers think only about themselves and the class they are writing, operator overloading seems to make matters worse. For example, class Array2 in the previous FAQ has more symbols and clutter than the Array version that didn't have operator overloading. However when programmers think about the overall complexity of the application, they see that operator overloading can help. For example, all the code written by all the users of Array2 will probably be a lot easier to understand than the equivalent code written using class Array (compare sample2() with sample() in the previous FAQ).