On Wednesday, 28 September 2016 at 20:16:08 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
Because there is no way to stop the former but still have
operator overloading.
To reiterate, operator overloading exists in D to support the
inclusion of arithmetic library types. Any other purpose is
discouraged, and that includes expression templates and things
like << for iostreams.
This is an obsolete way of thinking about operators. Operator
overloading exists to make the programmer's life easier, and
limiting the ways in which a valuable tool can be used drives
people to languages which allow them to be more expressive.
For my job I write Python. We use a database layer called
sqlalchemy that allows us to express queries by writing, for
example, `session.query(some_table).filter(row1 == row2)` and I
cannot begin to express how useful this is when writing code,
when maintaining code, and when attempting to understand code
that someone else wrote.
The objective should never be to stop the programmer from doing
something because you personally dislike the practice.
