I had the pleasure of dealing with C++ classes with a dozen or more gratuitously overloaded operators, including overloaded cast operators. You'd cast an object

I had the pleasure of dealing with C++ classes with a dozen or more gratuitously overloaded operators, including overloaded cast operators. You'd cast an object to a certain type in order to access a member of that type, instead of accessing that member in a normal way. I never doubted for a second that it was all done for job security, this stuff is real.