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
* vectors
* matrices
* tensors
* bigint operations (including bigint, bigfloat,...)
I think that all of those are easily defensible.
But I know of very few reasonable non-mathematical uses.
In C++, I've seen them used for iostreams, regexps, and some stuff that
is quite frankly bizarre.
So, please post any use cases which you consider convincing.
Some observations based on the use cases to date:
(1)
a += b is ALWAYS a = a + b (and likewise for all other operations).
opXXXAssign therefore seems to be a (limited) performance optimisation.
The compiler should be allowed to synthesize += from +. This would
almost halve the minimum number of repetitive functions required.
A straightforward first step would be to state in the spec that "the
compiler is entitled to assume that X+=Y yields the same result as X=X+Y"
(2)
There seems to be a need for abstract syntax trees, which is NOT
necessarily related to performance. (If we had a 'perfect performance'
solution for operator overloading, it would not remove the desire for
abstract syntax trees).
(3)
The array operations ~, [], [..] need further attention. A solution for
$ is also required.
