Overloading by return type

Question

I read few questions here on SO about this topic which seems yet confusing to me. I\'ve just begun to learn C++ and I haven\'t studied templates yet or operator overloading

Answer 1

It's possible, but I'm not sure that it's a technique I'd recommend for beginners. As in other cases, when you want the choice of functions to depend on how the return value is used, you use a proxy; first define functions like getChar and getInt, then a generic get() which returns a Proxy like this:

class Proxy
{
    My const* myOwner;
public:
    Proxy( My const* owner ) : myOwner( owner ) {}
    operator int() const
    {
        return myOwner->getInt();
    }
    operator char() const
    {
        return myOwner->getChar();
    }
};

Extend it to as many types as you need.