Re:Examples of Incorrect Abstractions in Other Languages
by gugagore on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @01:15AM
(#23243505)
This reason doesn't make sense to me, because of `+`. If I do `a + b`, you don't know if my intent is to add numbers, join strings, or concatenate lists. If `sum` and `join` are supposed to look different to convey intent, then the binary operators should look different as well.
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Re:Examples of Incorrect Abstractions in Other Languages
by stouset on Thursday May 21, 2020 @04:12PM
(#23264402)
The argument against operator overloading doesn't hold water with me at all.
If 3 + 2 is allowed but you don't think "a" + "b" should work, why should 8.1 + 1.9 work? If your argument is that it's because they're numbers, what about a Complex library, or numeric vectors, or GMP? If I can do 3 + 2 and 8.1 + 1.9, I should be allowed to make Complex{0, 1} + Complex{4, 9} work, or Vector{1, 0} + Vector{2, 2}, or BigInt{99999...} + BigInt{9999...}.
I can sort of see the argument in dynamically-typed languages when you might not know what the operands are ahead of time, but for statically-typed languages like Rust and Go (Rust gets this very, very right FWIW)? There's no defensible argument against it. Why is `+` magic and holy, but a `fn add(...)` isn't?