I've inherited a large Visual Studio 6 C++ project that needs to be translated for VS2005. Some of the classes defined operator< and operator[], but don't specify return types in the declarations. VS6 allows this, but not VS2005. I am aware that the C standard specifies that the default return type for normal functions is int, and I assumed VS6 might have been following that, but would this apply to C++ operators as well? Or could VS6 figure out the return type on its own? For example, the code defines a custom string class like this: class String { char arr[16]; public: operator<(const String& other) { return something1 < something2; } operator[](int index) { return arr[index]; } }; Would VS6 have simply put the return types for both as int, or would it have been smart enough to figure out that operator[] should return a char and operator< should return a bool (and not convert both results to int all the time)? Of course I have to add return types to make this code VS2005 C++ compliant, but I want to make sure to specify the same type as before, as to not immediately change program behavior (we're going for compatibility at the moment; we'll standardize things later).