Object returning its field possible?

Hi,

I am writing a class. Is there a way to return one of object's fields, instead of the object itself, when calling it? In other words, I want that my object becomes indistinguishable from double for all practical applications. I want to do this to avoid the need to overload all operators, and ensure all legacy code, which assumes that variables are of type double, can be used without any changes, and can remain compatible with both types.

The closest way I can think of is to overload the uplus operator, which for my class would return one of the fields, while having no effect on double. This will make the code transparent to variable type, but still requires code changes (unary + has to be added in front of each occurence of such variable) and will not be compatible with functions I cannot change e.g., built-in functions. Is there a better way?

Thanks!

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

See https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_oop/extend-built-in-class-operators.html

[Robert Borkowski]

Thank you! That's exactly what I was looking for.