On Thursday, 29 September 2016 at 11:29:55 UTC, Russel Winder
wrote:
However, this has come up many times, and every time Walter
says "no, it's wrong". Whilst the C++ iostreams << may have
problems, using this as a single point argument as to why
overloading fails in all other cases except numeric arithmetic
is bad philosophy. In my view this is holding D back.
To add some thoughts to this,
The use of << being bad is purely a matter of opinion.
If you believe that << is to only be used for bit-shifting
operations, you might hold the view that it is bad.
On the other hand, if you come from a background like Haskell or
Ruby, you might have a very different opinion.
ie.
In Ruby, << is named the shovel operator. It's uses are things
like appending an element into an Array.
Hence, a less opinionated point is necessary here.
