As you’ve found, JavaScript doesn’t support operator overloading. The closest you can come is to implement toString
(which will get called when the instance needs to be coerced to being a string) and valueOf
(which will get called to coerce it to a number, for instance when using +
for addition, or in many cases when using it for concatenation because +
tries to do addition before concatenation), which is pretty limited. Neither lets you create a Vector2
object as a result. Similarly, Proxy
(added in ES2015) lets you intercept various object operations (including property access), but again won’t let you control the result of +=
on Vector
instances.
For people coming to this question who want a string or number as a result (instead of a Vector2
), though, here are examples of valueOf
and toString
. These examples do not demonstrate operator overloading, just taking advantage of JavaScript’s built-in handling converting to primitives:
valueOf
This example doubles the value of an object’s val
property in response to being coerced to a primitive, for instance via +
:
Or with ES2015’s class
:
Or just with objects, no constructors:
toString
This example converts the value of an object’s val
property to upper case in response to being coerced to a primitive, for instance via +
:
Or with ES2015’s class
:
Or just with objects, no constructors: