> Ah, matrices! Does * mean dot product, cross product, or the usually less useful matrix multiplication? Ooh, or maybe you should you use . for dot! How clever that would be!
Why the snark? The fact that you're free to make a bad choice does not imply that having a free choice must be bad. Obviously neither dot nor cross product should be *. It should be the Hadamard product or matrix multiplication. You can choose one convention for your code and be perfectly happy for it.
As a follow-up question: How do you feel about languages like Fortran and Matlab then? Is it actually a good thing that mathematics convenience features are relegated to a few math-oriented languages and kept away from all the others? (Or are the linear algebra types in these languages offensive as well?)
Maybe C++26 will let us write operator·() and operator×().
In C++34 we'll finally have a way of overloading the empty string operator, so that we can, at last, write AB for the product of matrices A and B. As God intended.
Stroustrup, B. (1998, April 1) Generalizing Overloading for C++2000. AT&T Labs. https://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf
The benefits from operator overloading are "I can show this to a mathematician and it looks like what they're used to". The downsides lurk in the corners of whether it's actually doing what you think.
I'll pass.
> And that's speaking as someone who once implemented a path class with a subtraction operator that would return the relative path between two absolute ones. I thought I was very clever.
Haha! It's ok. The temptation to be clever with operators is too strong, few can resist before getting burned (or more usually, burning others!) at least once.