[1043] in java-interest
Re: Operator underloading (was: overloading of operators)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Scott Treacy)
Thu Aug 17 14:11:58 1995
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 15:47:43 +0000
To: java-interest@java.sun.com
From: S.P.Treacy@scotborders.co.uk (Scott Treacy)
>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? :-)
Sound like quite a good idea to me....
>Philip
>
>
>---
>Philip Gladstone
>Onsett International Corporation, Cambridge, MA
>
>
>-
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>
* Scott P. Treacy * Email: S.P.Treacy@elgeebar.scotborders.co.uk *
* aka Elgeebar * Phone: +44 1896 870490 Fax: +44 1896 757965 *
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