>I have yet to see any of this be an actual problem in real-world projects Just on Monday, I was bitten by a bug caused by operator overloading. I'm building a

>I have yet to see any of this be an actual problem in real-world projects Just on Monday, I was bitten by a bug caused by operator overloading. I'm building a static analysis tool in C++. There's a method `getType()` that returns the qualified type of an expression. I had a call to `getType()` nested in some other calls, e.g. `expr->asAssignmentExpr()->getRHS()->getType()->getSomeQualifiedTypeProperty()`. The creators of the `QualifiedType` type that's returned by `getType()` had overridden the class member access operator to return an UnqualifiedType. This problem took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to diagnose. The compiler error messages told me that `UnqualifiedType` doesn't have a property `getSomeQualifiedTypeProperty`, but I couldn't see why I was getting an unqualified type from a method that is supposed to return a qualified type. I searched the documentation online, searched the header files, tried reinstalling the library, nothing made sense. Then, I learned this operator had been overloaded. So, I just needed to write `expr->asAssignmentExpr()->getRHS()->getType().getSomeQualifiedTypeProperty()`. Ouch.