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You're reading from  Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2

Product typeBook
Published inJan 2016
Reading LevelIntermediate
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ISBN-139781785885693
Edition1st Edition
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Gaston C. Hillar
Gaston C. Hillar
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Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
Read more about Gaston C. Hillar

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Taking advantage of operator overloading


Swift allows us to redefine specific operators to work in a different way based on the classes to which we apply them. For example, we can make comparison operators, such as less than (<) and greater than (>), return the results of comparing the age value when they are applied to instances of Dog.

Tip

The redefinition of operators to work in a specific way when applied to instances of specific classes is known as operator overloading. Swift allows us to overload operators through the usage of operator functions.

An operator that works in one way when applied to an instance of a class might work differently on instances of another class. We can also redefine the overloaded operators to work on specific subclasses. For example, we can make the comparison operators work in a different way in a superclass and its subclass.

We want to be able to compare the age of the different Animal instances using the following binary operators in Swift:

  • Less than...

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Object???Oriented Programming with Swift 2
Published in: Jan 2016Publisher: ISBN-13: 9781785885693

Author (1)

author image
Gaston C. Hillar

Gaston C. Hillar is Italian and has been working with computers since he was 8 years old. Gaston has a Bachelor's degree in computer science (graduated with honors) and an MBA. Currently, Gaston is an independent IT consultant and a freelance author who is always looking for new adventures anywhere in the world. He was a senior contributing editor at Dr. Dobb's, and has written more than a hundred articles on software development topics. He has received the prestigious Intel Black Belt Software Developer award eight times. He has written many articles about Java for Oracle Java Magazine. Gaston was also a former Microsoft MVP in technical computing. He lives with his wife, Vanesa, and his two sons, Kevin and Brandon.
Read more about Gaston C. Hillar