Operator Overloading in C

This thesis is concerned with investigating an approach for adding problem notation to a computer language. A method is proposed for modifying a programming language to fit problem notation by including the capability of defining a problem specific set of symbols or operators in the language. The proposed method for extending a language uses operator overloading to map language operations to the problem notation. This method is shown to be feasible for the case where the language is defined through a context free grammar and where the problem abstractions are implemented through object services or functions. We also show how generalized operator overloading can be used to resolve some of the language difficulties implicit in C, which cannot be done through C++ operator overloading. A preprocessor for C was built to study the problems and effects of adding generalized operator overloading to a language. Experience with this method suggests that problems may occur when encoding the semantic variations for a problem service, selecting unambiguous operator symbols, and implementing general language extensions for assignment operations and identifier references. Host language support for reference variables is necessary. Our results indicate that generalized operator overloading can be used to provide a domain specific problem notation that is user defined, but processed by C code.