On Wednesday, 3 July 2013 at 12:45:53 UTC, TommiT wrote:
On Wednesday, 3 July 2013 at 12:24:33 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
On Tuesday, 2 July 2013 at 22:28:24 UTC, TommiT wrote:
On Tuesday, 2 July 2013 at 21:48:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/2/2013 1:47 PM, TommiT wrote:
Division operator for strings doesn't make any sense,
That's why overloading / to do something completely
unrelated to division is anti-ethical to writing
understandable code. The classic example of this is the
overloading of << and >> for stream operations in C++.
I've never thought of it like that. At some point I remember
writing a vector type which overloaded its binary * operator
to mean dot product (or cross product, I can't remember). So,
you can overload an operator, but you can't overload the
meaning of an operator.
This is something I was discussing with a friend recently, and
we agreed it would be cool if there were set of operators with
no definition until overloaded, so you could use e.g. (.) for
dot product, (*) for cross product, (+) (or maybe [+]?) for
matrix add, etc. instead of overloading things that already
have specific, well-understood meaning.
-Wyatt
I don't see why we couldn't add the actual unicode ∙ and ×
characters to the language, make them operators and give them
the fixed meaning of dot product and cross product respectively.
Wouldn't + be the correct operator to use for matrix addition.
What happens when matrices are added is quite different from
when real values are added, but the meaning of + is still
addition for the both of them.
Time to bring back those old APL keyboards - we can have a lot
more symbols then ;-)
MP
