On Saturday, 20 February 2016 at 12:29:21 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Saturday, February 20, 2016 03:24:45 Jeremy DeHaan via
Digitalmars-d-learn wrote:
snip
I'm unaware of any language that takes the return type into
account when overloading. The type the expression test.thing()
has to be determined before the assignment is evaluated, and it
would be very confusing if the return type were used for
overload evaluation in a context like this, because there are
other contexts where it would be impossible to do that even
theoretically - the simplest being
auto thingOne = test.thing();
So, suddenly, which function gets called would depend on where
the expression was used, which would just be confusing and
error-prone.
- Jonathan M Davis
With the case of auto of course there is ambiguity, you don't
know which one to pick. In my example there should have been no
ambiguity at all as only one of the overloads would actually
compile. That is what confuses me and why I think return type
should be taken into account.
If there are multiple overloads that have the same number of
parameters, a very simple addition to the rules of function
overloading would be "does it compile?" If only one overload
compiles, use it. If more than one compile, there is ambiguity
and its an error.
