On Sunday, 21 February 2016 at 22:32:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
I'm not thrilled about overloading | with a non-arithmetic purpose. I hated iostreams' use of << from the beginning.
Ditto, I've always hated it as well. I recall reading that the original iostream class was an example class (and badly designed), not only does the implementation look ugly to use, but it has no value in a logical/mathematical way unlike how those operators are intended to work natively (unlike say gmp or BigNum or something).
At least overloading the + in Java was limited strictly to concatenation of strings.
I can sort of see how the | (pipe) might be overloaded acceptably if you're working a lot with shell (script programmers) where you send the output of one program as the input of another, but that doesn't appear to offer any real advantage compared to what is already being used with UFCS.
Best not to break what's not broke.
