Operator= overloading

[SuperFerrell]

Hey, first post here, seems like a cool forums, hopefull I'll be a frequent poster.

I'm having some trouble with operator overloading here, it doesn't really like my operator=. Some background, I'm writing a simple language scanner/parser for an assembly language class (we have a virtual assembly language we're writing an interpreter for, this project is a pseudo-assembler to put the asm code into raw op codes for the interpreter)... so I'm using a token object (it's just a struct, might end up making a class out of it, not that it matters), and here's the code it doesn't like:

token& operator= (const token& right) {
	tokenID = right.tokenID;
	return this;
}

Borland's command line compiler (5.5.1) is giving me "Reference initialized with 'token * const', needs lvalue of type 'token' in function token:: operator =(const token &)" on the return line.

any help would be greatly appreciated

<EDIT> I got it to compile by changing the return to "return *this;" ... but it doesn't work properly, I'm still getting the initial value set by this's constructor </EDIT>

[redhead]

Could it be:

token& token::operator=(const token& right)
{
  tokenID = right.tokenID;
  return *this;
}

instead??

[SuperFerrell]

yes, I tried that, and it worked, but I'd rather use a reference to the object instead of a pointer to the object when assigning... with the pointer, I'm stuck using:

token x;
const int EOF_TOK = 7;
//....
token* y = x;
token* z = EOF_TOK;

I just decided to scrap the operator= and just have to use y.tokenID = x.tokenID or y.tokenID = EOF_TOK; ... while it isn't fancy and cool, it works, just extra typing in MANY lines of code

with vi named buffers forget the typing and just use "Xp