[1069] in java-interest
Re: overloading of operators
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Piers Cawley)
Thu Aug 17 23:28:57 1995
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 16:50:47 +0100 (BST)
From: Piers Cawley <pdcawley@ftech.net>
To: Tom Wheeler <tomw@intelligraphics.com>
ReSent-From: Piers Cawley <pdcawley@ftech.net>
ReSent-To: java-interest@java.sun.com
On Wed, 16 Aug 1995, Tom Wheeler wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Aug 1995 10:45:23 -0700 you wrote:
> You seem to have a rather low opinion of programmers in general given
> this strong desire to keep operator overloading out of Java. Granted,
> there are a lot of people out there who can barely code their way out
> of an infinite loop, but there are also a lot of programmers who can
> write code most of the rest of us poor slobs can but dream of. Why
> limit them just because of the potential for abuse by incompetents?
If they're that good then they could probably do the job in intercal.
Doesn't mean it's going to be easy for someone else to come along and
maintain the code. Sure tools like op-ov make it easy to write code
initially, but that's not what we're talking about -- we're talking about
code which, if it's anything like big, is going to have to be maintained
by people who didn't write it.
And personally, if I'm going to be maintaining code, the fewer gotchas
like a+b adding strings as opposed to m+n adding integers, the happier I
am. Are you really telling me that you're too lazy to type a function
name rather than an operator -- cos if you're too lazy to do that, I have
to go through the code typing
// concatenating strings
after any occurence of the form a + b before I get on with the job of
working out wtf your code does.
Piers Cawley -- Systems Sheriff on the Frontier Internet Service
Purveyors of fine connections to the Internet
Phone:+44 171 242 3383
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