Operator overloading

[rliq]

Say I wanted to override the '+' operator for the following class:

public class MyClass
{
    private MyType _mySecretInternalRepresentation;  // MyType maybe UInt32 for example

    public static MyClass operator+(MyClass a, MyClass b)
    {
        // code required here
    }
}

Ok, *I*know how to add a to b, but how can i get at their internal representation so I can perform the add, without exposing the internal representation (making it public) to everyone and breaking one of the fundamental laws of OO ?

Am I missing something? I'm sure in C++ I had access to private members of the *same* class within an operator overload function.

Microsoft give an example in the documentation (see operator overloading C# vs Java) for complex numbers, but their ComplexNumber class has public members which is not good because individual parts of the complex number can be modified independently by external code.