On 06/17/2015 02:28 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Wednesday, 17 June 2015 at 06:23:15 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2015-06-16 22:36, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Sounds like it's preventing an abuse of operator overloading to me... :)
Sounds like it's preventing a perfectly good use case. Or do you
prefer AST macros instead :)
I prefer that operators actually do what they're supposed to do per how
they work with the built-in types and that they not be redefined to do
something else. An operator which is overloaded specifically do
something other than what occurs with the built-in types is just begging
for problems. Sure, we can't prevent all operator overloading abuses,
and they can be misimplemented just like any other function, but the
whole point of having operator overloading is to make it so that
user-defined types can look and operate like built-in types, not to
invent new syntax, and I think that inventing new syntax via operator
overloading is a _very_ clear abuse of it. And I really don't think that
folks should be trying to add syntax to the language for DSLs or
anything of the sort, and I'm very glad that D prevents that in many
cases while still allowing us to have useful features such as operator
overloading.
- Jonathan M Davis
FWIW, the use case presented was roughly to make the database look and
operate like built-in arrays.
