Plz answer?

Question

please explain this code, what is the purpose of that friend overloaded function, i mean why only overload that with friend,

https://www.sololearn.com/post/15495/?ref=app

Answer 1

The purpose of overloading the << operator is to have an easy way of printing your object to the console. Its definition would probably look something like this:

ostream& Complex::operator<<(ostream& o, const Complex& c) {
o << c.x << "/" << c.y;
return o;
}

This way, you can write
cout << c;
in your code when you want to print the number (where c is any object of type Complex).
But as you can see, the function accesses private members, thus it is a friend. If you don't want it to be a friend function, you can make get() methods for your private variables and call those instead. E.g.
o << c.getX() ...

Answer 2

thanks.