Overloading Operators

Need for operator overloading

Traditionally we use operators on numeric types to create expressions, for example, $2 + 3$ or $4.2 * 7.1$. Operator overloading is a feature where the language extends the capability to use operators on user-defined data types.

Compare the two lines in the following code snippet:

bigInteger1.multiply(bigInteger2) 

bigInteger1 * bigInteger2

The first line uses the multiply method from the JDK. The second line uses the * operator on the instances of BigInteger; ...