On Thursday, 24 January 2013 at 19:36:35 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky
wrote:
The same argument was brought about overloading operators,
about overloading functions, etc. In other words the argument
is WYSIWYG, but humans inherently think in overloaded notions
and take obvious shortcuts
just about everywhere.
That is not because it is ambiguous, where . overload behavior
for pointer isn't.
Such behavior would be like if pointer dereferenced automagically
and you add to put & everywhere to not dereference them. That
would be an horrible behavior, as well as calling function
automatically is an horrible behavior.
So we want to avoid () for convenience. I have noting against
convenience, but here it is plain wrong :
- We have 2 syntax to do the same thing.
- If the return value is callable, it is unclear what is done.
- We need something to NOT call the function, as it is called
magically. Let's introduce &funName syntax and mess up with
another feature.
- It is now unclear when we take the return address or the
address of the function.
- It is also not clear how to pass a function as parameter (we
have seen the case recently).
- Depending on the callable, () and & have different behaviors,
which is error prone, harder to learn for newcomer, harder for
generic code, and exactly what everybody hate about C++ .
I have nothing against convenience, and like very much the
pointer + dot behavior. I actuelly proposed something similar
with functions : function.identifier can call the function
without (), which is the equivalent of the pointer thing in term
of convenience. Going further inherently mess up with other
features of the language.
