On Thursday, 1 September 2016 at 10:53:01 UTC, Ethan Watson wrote:
On Thursday, 1 September 2016 at 10:43:50 UTC, Dominikus Dittes
Scherkl wrote:
I have never seen what benefit could be gained from having
overloads.
Oh, it's perfectly fine if you're not writing a library that's
designed to allow user extension by going the "all in one"
method. If you encourage your users to modify your function
itself, they can no longer drop in a new version and have to do
a merge.
Ok, that may be fine, until you reach the point with the fallback
version: if after that point someone "drops in" a new version, he
silently changes the behavior of the function, because he
"steals" some type which used to use the fallback version.
--> overloads make only sense, if a function is NOT for all
types, so you can add an overload for some type that was not
considered so far, but you should not change the behaviour for
some type that was already covered.
At all, most of the time I prefer that the users directly change
the function, yes.
