Re: In Praise of Strong Typing

On Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:21:34 -0700, Daniel Pitts
<newsgroup.spamfilter@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote, quoted or indirectly
quoted someone who said :

>There have been times where I have heavily missed operator overloading 
>in Java :-)

My Forth background makes me too yearn for the elegance of operator
notation for my own functions.  

However, you don't need overloading to get the benefits of operator
notation.   If you were allowed to define a new operator that looked
like + but looked slightly different, the code would have the elegant
terseness of  operator overloading without the confusion as to when
you are using a primitive and when the new definition.

see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2A00.pdf
and
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2200.pdf
for some possibilities.

I have never seen an example of operator overloading that was not
utterly confusing.  Code is automatically bad if you use the feature.
It as not a matter of ALLOWING you to write bad code. It FORCES you to
write bad code.

-- 

Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
The Java Glossary
http://mindprod.com