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up vote 2 down vote favorite

I'm trying to figure out how to add two classes together with a simple arithmetic addition

The class i've written is a Vector3 class it looks like this

public class Vector3 {

public float x, y, z;

public Vector3(){
    x = 0.0f;
    y = 0.0f;
    z = 0.0f;
}

public Vector3(float _x, float _y, float _z){
    this.x = _x;
    this.y = _y;
    this.z = _z;
}
public Vector3 add(Vector3 other){
    Vector3 temp = new Vector3(this.x+other.x, this.y+other.y, this.z+other.z);
    return temp;
}

}

I have added the add method in order to be able to add vectors together temporarily. but i really want to be able to just type vectorA+vectorB instead of having to type vectorA.add(vectorB)

is there a way to do this. i know you can do it in python.

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put on hold as off-topic by Krom Stern, Anko, Philipp, Ilmari Karonen, msell 5 hours ago

This question appears to be off-topic. The users who voted to close gave this specific reason:

  • "Programming questions that aren't specific to game development are off-topic here, but can be asked on Stack Overflow. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself "would a professional game developer give me a better/different/more specific answer to this question than other programmers?"" – Krom Stern, Anko, Philipp, Ilmari Karonen, msell
If this question can be reworded to fit the rules in the help center, please edit the question.
    
That's called operator overloading and has been addressed on Stack Overflow previously for Java. –  Anko 15 hours ago
    
If you like that, come to the dark side, C#! We have all the cool stuff for ages: lambdas, type inference, nonweird generics (debatable), operator overloads, extension methods, properties (no more getx, setx), "streaming operations" (LINQ), etc. –  Kroltan 8 hours ago
    
I wish I could use c#. But I'm studying software engineering. And we have to use java for the first two semesters :/ –  Daniel Holst 7 hours ago

2 Answers 2

up vote 6 down vote accepted

To put it bluntly, you can't. Java does not allow the user to define operator overloads. You will have to continue to use the Vector3::add(Vector3) method that you have already created.

Java is Java, Python is Python (C++ is C++, and C is C); they are all different languages that do different things. You shouldn't expect one thing to work because it works in another language.

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up vote 1 down vote

Java doesn't support operator overloading, but a similar language, C#, does. (C# and Java are very similar and are usually compared with each other)

The Unity engine, which uses C# scripting, already defines a Vector3 class, with several overloaded operators (including + and -).

There, you can do something like:

Vector3 result = new Vector3(1, 2, 3) + new Vector3(4, 5, 6);

Of course, if you cannot change your programming language (either by choice or because of the framework used), then this is not an option, and you should stick to using the add() method.

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