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?
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?