[1041] in java-interest
Operator underloading (was: overloading of operators)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Philip Gladstone)
Thu Aug 17 13:10:57 1995
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 09:40:33 EDT
From: Philip Gladstone <Philip.Gladstone@onsett.com>
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
Walter Smith wrote:
>Another issue: If it looks small, it looks cheap. That + sign may be
>costing unbounded amounts of space and time, but most people are trained to
>think it's a one-cycle integer add. Sure, if you ask them, they may know
>what it is, but when they're quickly scanning the code, they pass right
>over it.
I propose that we do some operator-underloading. The + sign is already used
for integers and floating point. This leads to endless confusion, so I
propose that + is reserved only for integers, and that a new operator
("floatAdd" - if you like smalltalk syntax) or a class member function be
defined to add floats.
This approach has some useful advantages - the comparison operator <
would be replaced by "floatLessThan", and we could eliminate the
floating point <= operator entirely (as floating point numbers are
very rarely equal to other floating point numbers).
The readability of the language would improve - you wouldn't have to
worry about whether 10/4 is actually 2 or 2.5
Any more votes for operator underloading? :-)
Philip
---
Philip Gladstone
Onsett International Corporation, Cambridge, MA
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