Don wrote:
There's been some interesting discussion about operator overloading over
the past six months, but to take the next step, I think we need to
ground it in reality. What are the use cases?
I think that D's existing opCmp() takes care of the plethora of trivial
cases where <, >= etc are overloaded. It's the cases where the
arithmetic and logical operations are overloaded that are particularly
interesting to me.
The following mathematical cases immediately spring to mind:
* complex numbers
* quaternions (interesting since * is anti-commutative, a*b = -b*a)
Not true. Quaternion multiplication does have the distinction of being
non-commutative in the general case, but anti-commutativity occurs in
only some special cases.
If you really want anti-commutativity, look at vectors under cross
multiplication.
Other unusual number systems: hypercomplex, biquaternions, octonions,
p-adic numbers
* vectors
* matrices
* tensors
* bigint operations (including bigint, bigfloat,...)
<snip>
And possibly rational and Euclidean number types.
Stewart.
