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copied!<p>Femaref's answer is pretty good; I'd like to expand on it.</p> <p>Operators are (usually) hard-wired into the language: Stuff like <code>+</code>, <code>-</code>, <code>*</code> and <code>/</code> are usually directly translated by the compiler into machine language (if that's the underlying mechanism for that language system) without the need to explicitly call a method in a library. This is how it is/was in C, for instance. If those operators weren't defined in the language, you'd have to code <code>plus(2,2)</code> instead of <code>2 + 2</code>.</p> <p>Operators defined in the language come with the benefit of built-in priority. <code>*</code> and <code>/</code> usually have higher priority than <code>+</code> and <code>-</code>, so you can write <code>3 * 3 + 4 * 4</code> and get 25, not 52 or 84 that you'd get without such priorization or different priorities.</p> <p>The line becomes a little grey when operators are recognized by the compiler but still delegated to a library. Complex numbers in FORTRAN may be an example: Often the compiler will not bother to directly compile complex operations into machine code but will generate machine code to call a library.</p> <p>Most people think only of the arithmetic operators, like <code>+</code>, <code>-</code> and so forth. But you could also consider square brackets ( <code>[ ]</code> ) an operator for array indexing, for example.</p> <p>Some languages let you overload their operators, so you can substitute a call to a method for whatever the operator normally does.</p> <p>Most languages don't let you define your own operators that support the same mechanisms as the built-in ones. Scala is an exception here; you can define a <code>+++</code> operator if you like and have it hook up to a method you provide. Some people think operator overloading makes code harder to understand, so the jury is still out about whether this is a good idea.</p>

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