Why would anyone want to overload the & (address-of) operator? [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Closed 11 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:

What legitimate reasons exist to overload the unary operator& ?

I just read this ques开发者_运维知识库tion, and I can't help but wonder:

Why would anyone possibly want to overload the & ("address-of") operator?

SomeClass* operator&() const {
    return address_of_object;
}

Is there any legitimate use case?

---

If you're dealing with any sort of wrapper objects, you might want or need to transparently forward the access to the wrapper to the contained object. In that case, you can't return a pointer to the wrapper, but need to overload the address-of operator to return a pointer to the contained object.

---

Yes, for debugging (if you want to trace any access or reference, you might want to put a log line on any call to &, * or ->).

---

Because they're evil and want you to suffer.

Or I guess if you are using proxy objects? I suppose you might want to return a pointer to the managed object instead of the container - although i'd rather do that with a getter function. Otherwise you'd have to remember to use things like std::addressof.

---

I have seen this in productive code already.

But there, a binary representation of the content of a struct was returned, not just 0.

And the usecase was simple: Binary operations.