Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 11:20 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
I think that argument is rather weak and ought to be revisited. It's weak to
start with as if writing "+" in a D program hardly evokes anything else but
"plus". What the notation effectively achieved was put more burden on the
programmer to memorize some names for the already-known symbols. I think the
entire operator overloading business, which started from a legitimate desire
to improve on C++'s, ended up worse off.
It does, however, introduce a nice naming scheme for naming
"meta-methods", that is, methods which are called indirectly to
overload certain language structures. opApply is an example of such a
method which doesn't truly have a corresponding operator, and I'm sure
there could be other other methods for other language constructs,
existing or theoretical. (though I'm sure you'll agree opApply's
behavior could use a rehaul too)
This is the vomit in the fat lady's cleavage that shows just how bad the
wine turned out to be.
That has to be one of the most disgusting metaphors I've ever heard ;)
For iterators, increment is quite different from
addition of an arbitrary number, so what D managed to do was effectively to
cripple iterators. The standard library will use ranges with named functions
so it avoids the issue, but if someone wants to define STL-style iterators
they won't be able to.
I suppose most people who _aren't_ coming from C++ (*cough* like me
*cough*) won't be terribly unhappy about this situation.
I'm not sure how that computes. The particular notion has little to do
with C++ and is rather fundamental, so not grokking it should motivate
one to look into it (as opposed to being glad for not knowing).
Andrei
