What happens when you don't have operators and sugar? You get ten-times-worse unreadable mess like anonymous inner subclasses. You get a dirty mix of a+b and a.add(b). And finally, you get a language that has to be extended with revisions of the core, rather than with libraries.
Scala's operators are OK, but Haskell's are better yet because of the concept of a typeclass. You can't abuse + because it comes bundled with -, instances which support < are guaranteed to support ==, and so on. Operators actually have meanings that aren't arbitrary.
Re:On Scala's future
by blasdel on Saturday August 08, 2009 @01:18AM
(#749001)
Beyond that, in Haskell you can make your own infix functions with arbitrary symbols, arbitrary meaning, and arbitrary precedence when that's what you want.
Scala's operators are OK, but Haskell's are better yet because of the concept of a typeclass. You can't abuse + because it comes bundled with -, instances which support < are guaranteed to support ==, and so on. Operators actually have meanings that aren't arbitrary.