Compound-Assignment Operators

Compound assignment operators are not required to be members. However, we prefer to define all assignments, including compound assignments, in the class. For consistency with the built-in compound assignment, these operators should return a reference to their left-hand operand. For example, here is the definition of the Sales_data compound-assignment operator:

// member binary operator: left-hand operand is bound to the implicit this pointer
// assumes that both objects refer to the same book
Sales_data& Sales_data::operator+=(const Sales_data &rhs)
{
    units_sold += rhs.units_sold;
    revenue += rhs.revenue;
    return *this;
}