On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 1:01 PM, Larry Wall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> While I agree with the sentiment of not arbitrarily restricting
> people from doing ugly things unless they ask for such restrictions,
Agreed... though I disagree that the sort of overloading under
discussion ("/" for separating paths) falls into the "ugly things"
category.
> I'd also like to point out that the desire to maintain consistent
> symbolic distinctions is not limited to mathematicians.
Absolutely. Or rather, not absolutely. I think absolute consistency
is in the same category as absolute orthogonality... too much of a
good thing.
> The use of + in Python or << in C++ is, I think, primarily the
> violation of a *linguistic* principle, not a mathematical principle.
Maybe it's just 'cause I cut my teeth on BASIC, but + for string
concatenation has always felt pretty natural. Obviously it won't work
in Perl where you are using the operator to determine how to treat the
operands. At first blush I find it more readily readable than "&" or
"||", or even ".".
And "<<" makes sense for the various kinds of appending it is used for
in C++, Ruby, etc, but only if you don't look at it and think "bit
shift". Fortuantely, bit shift isn't a fundamental arithmetic
operation in the traditional sense, and the set of people who think
that is proportionally smaller.
> The typical user already has a good notion of what the common operators
> are, and what they mean. So while drastically changing the meaning
> of one of those operators may not be a disservice to the writer of
> the code, it may well be a disservice to the reader.
I agree *changing* the meaning is bad. But the Good Kind of operator
overloading doesn't do that; it just adds a new meaning. It really is
"overloading". Hopefully, the new meaning is somewhat related to the
original - a sort of operator metonymy - but if the context is
sufficiently different, that's not a requirement. Again, nobody's
going to think you're dividing pathnames.
> Perl is about linguistics, and hence is more concerned with successful
> communication than with pure mathematical platonics.
Which is why I like it so much more than certain of its brethren with
their Orthogonality Ueber Alles attitude. I just don't want to see
that sort of prescriptivity creep in to Perl.
--
Mark J. Reed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
