Giving a function implementation more than one name in c++

Question

Let say I have a basic 2D vector class something like

class vector2
{
  int x, y;
}

these two values could be used to represent a position

Answer 1

It appears you're not thinking about this in an object oriented way. I have to second mjfgates advice that you really don't want to do this.

What you want to do is abstract the idea of a vector into a class and implement the common methods you might want to use with a vector. In fact, you may want to consider implementing your class example above as a "Point" class and then have a "Vector" class aggregate two point classes.

Using your example, your class would not be well defined if it was used for two different purposes. Let's say you want to make a method on some class to draw vector2. You would have to know which instances of vector2 are representing a starting point and which ones are representing a width/height. You'd probably also need a third representation to represent direction. The easier way is to implement the vector in terms of getStartPoint, getEndPoint, and any other methods that will do calculations appropriate for the vector. Then the consumer doesn't need to know about the internal working of the vector2 class, they just call the methods to get the information they need.