Tristan Zajonc <mailto:[email protected]>
October 27, 2013 5:47 PM
I apologize for jumping in here with an incomplete understanding
what's being proposed, but perhaps somebody can help clarify it for
me. I've been following value types and operator overloading
discussion with great interest. From the slides and video, it appears
that operator overloading is only being discussed in the context of
immutable value objects. Is this right? Or is it just what the
examples use? If operator overloading only applies to value objects,
what's the motivation?
Do you mean "what's the motivation for not applying operators to mutable
objects too?"
I've implemented a large part of MATLAB/R like functionality in
JavaScript. The biggest hurdle is a tolerable API for the core matrix
and dataframe types. While perhaps silly, it's a deal breaker for
some people coming from other environments. Otherwise, JS is an
amazing platform, particularly with ES6 features.
Mutable objects may want certain operators for convenience, but for
mutable objects in JS, === must be reference (not transient value)
identity, and == would be pretty bug-inducing if transient value
comparing. Same comment for < and <=.
A secondary issue, and probably a bigger can of worms, is whether the
proposal will allow for additional operators. For matrices, there is
a well-defined and established set of operators that operate
elementwise and objectwise (MATLABs dot-operators vs. operators).
What punctuators or (non-ASCII?) lexemes would you want for these operators?
The API Function.defineOperator(symbol, type1, type2) would be perfect
to support this. However I assume this is not the intention? Is there
any openness to supporting user defined infix operators or at least an
extended set similar to Python's PEP 225 proposal
(http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0225/)?
I'm not proposing syntactically novel operator extension. That is hard
in a C-like language, but doable with enough work. It would be a
separate proposal on top.
Sorry if my comments are based on not understanding the proposal.
No worries,
/be
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