How to overload operator << to act like what ostream does

Question

I am on implementing a class, and I'd like to pass some parameters to the instance using <<.

For example,

terminal term;
term << "Hello World!" << '\n';

The code goes below,

class terminal {
    template <typename T>
    terminal& operator << (T& t) {
        std::cout << t;
        return *this;
    }
};

Basically, I'd like to be a stream instead of being the part of stream. (not cout << term;)

(Sorry for that I forgot to specify my question) The question is, it worked well with strings, but it compiled failed if there is a number (like int, char, etc).

If we use the example above, the compiler will complain that

Invalid operands to binary expression ('terminal' and 'int')

Answer 1

I would change to the following, in order for sequencing of operator<< (e.g., term << "hello" << std::endl; ) to work:

namespace foo {

class terminal {    
  std::ostream &strm;
public:
  terminal(std::ostream &strm_) : strm(strm_) {}
  terminal() : strm(std::cout) {}

  template <typename T>
  friend std::ostream& operator<<(terminal &term, T const &t);
};

template <typename T>
std::ostream& operator<<(terminal &term, T const &t) {
  term.strm << t;
  return term.strm;
}

}

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