On Friday, 8 May 2015 at 17:00:00 UTC, Manfred Nowak wrote:
Jonathan M Davis wrote:
And why not just use another function instead of opEquals for
what you want?
Because the local `opEquals' _is_ the overload-function for
`==' and `!='.
I guess that your "another function"-opinion holds for every
form of overloading.
In general, D is far more restrictive in how it defines
overloaded operators than C++ is. This helps enforce the
correctness and consistency of such operators and reduces how
much code has to be written. Occasionally, that means that there
are things that you can do in C++ with overloaded operators that
you cannot do in D with overloaded operators, and perhaps that is
a loss, but on the whole, it's well worth the gains (e.g. by
defining only opEquals and opCmp, you get the whole suite of
overloaded operators, whereas in C++, you'd have to implement
each and every one of them individually, which is both far more
verbose and far more error-prone).
So, if an overloaded operator does not work with what you're
trying to do, then you need to use a function of your own to
implement it.
- Jonathan M Davis
