Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, posed this interesting use of overloading:
http://www2.research.att.com/~bs/whitespace98.pdf The idea was somewhat forced upon him by ATT Labs mathematicians and physicists who wanted: int x,y,z; z=xy to function as in standard math notation as set z to x times y. I believe the notion failed to achieve popularity due to lexical scoping of the language, where variables might lie in entirely different bodies of source code. Closures were, of course considered as a way to define the allowed scope for variables, but C++ had not implemented them. -- Owen
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