On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote: > I think that argument is rather weak and ought to be revisited. It's weak to > start with as if writing "+" in a D program hardly evokes anything else but > "plus". What the notation effectively achieved was put more burden on the > programmer to memorize some names for the already-known symbols. I think the > entire operator overloading business, which started from a legitimate desire > to improve on C++'s, ended up worse off.
It does, however, introduce a nice naming scheme for naming "meta-methods", that is, methods which are called indirectly to overload certain language structures. opApply is an example of such a method which doesn't truly have a corresponding operator, and I'm sure there could be other other methods for other language constructs, existing or theoretical. (though I'm sure you'll agree opApply's behavior could use a rehaul too) > This is the vomit in the fat lady's cleavage that shows just how bad the > wine turned out to be. That has to be one of the most disgusting metaphors I've ever heard ;) > For iterators, increment is quite different from > addition of an arbitrary number, so what D managed to do was effectively to > cripple iterators. The standard library will use ranges with named functions > so it avoids the issue, but if someone wants to define STL-style iterators > they won't be able to. I suppose most people who _aren't_ coming from C++ (*cough* like me *cough*) won't be terribly unhappy about this situation.
