On Thursday, 29 September 2016 at 04:39:37 UTC, Minty Fresh wrote:
This applies to operator overloads just like everything else. They're just syntactic sugar for functions. Documenting their behavior is just as necessary.
I disagree with this. Operators are different in that the symbols themselves already have meaning and are a core part of the language. When I see a function in code that was written by someone else, I have no idea what it really does, no matter how it was named, until I pull up the documentation or the source and actually read it. I expect that I'm going to have to do that. Using operators in ways they were not intended to be used is breaking my expectations.
When I'm scanning D code and see a '+', I'm going to think addition (and not concatenation or appending or anything else). It isn't going to occur to me that the types involved are doing something completely different and I ought to look in the documentation to see what that is. And I shouldn't have to worry about it. That sort of cognitive disruption is really annoying.
In D1, operators were overloaded *by name* and not by symbol. I loved that, because it made it quite clear that opAdd is an addition and doing something different with it would be akin to having a function named printFoo launching an audio player. And if printFoo *did* launch an audio player, I'm quite confident most programmers would consider the function horribly misnamed. The same applies to operators, as I see it.
