You can leverage operator overloading or to add functionality to operators so as to work with user defined types much the same way you work with fundamental data types.

ostream operator overload in C++ template LoneGumMan Dec 9, 2002 Jump to latest Follow Reply ...

In addition to adding conformable matrices, you can also use the addition operator to add a matrix and a scalar or two scalars. When you use the matrix + scalar (or scalar + matrix) form, the scalar ...