Why Operator Overloading in not allowed in JAVA?

Java does not support operator overloading by programmers. This is not the same as stating that Java does not need operator overloading. Operator overloading is syntactic sugar to express an operation using (arithmetic) symbols. For obvious reasons, the designers of the Java programming language chose to omit support for operator overloading in the language. This declaration can be found in the Java Language Environment whitepaper: There are no means provided by which programmers can overload the standard arithmetic operators. Once again, the effects of operator overloading can be just as easily achieved by declaring a class, appropriate instance variables, and appropriate methods to manipulate those variables. Eliminating operator overloading leads to great simplification of code. In my personal opinion, that is a wise decision. Consider the following piece of code: String b = "b"; String c = "c"; String a = b + c; Now, it is fairly evident that b and c are concatenated to yield a. But when one consider the following snippet written using a hypothetical language that supports operator overloading, it is fairly evident that using operator overloading does not make for readable code. Person b = new Person("B"); Person c = new Person("C"); Person a = b + c; In order to understand the result of the above operation, one must view the implementation of the overloaded addition operator for the Person class. Surely, that makes for a tedious debugging session, and the code is better implemented as: Person b = new Person("B"); Person c = new Person("C"); Person a = b.copyAttributesFrom(c); read less

Java doesn't support multiple inheritance, no pointers in Java, and no pass by reference in Java. Rarely this question asked in Java interviews, to check how programmer thinks about certain features, which is not supported in Java. Another similar questions is regarding Java being pass by reference, which is mostly appear as, whether Java is pass by value or reference. Though I don't know the real reason behind it, I think following observation make sense on, why Operator overloading is not supported in Java. read less