[509] in java-interest
Re: BigInteger class out there?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Lorton)
Mon Jun 26 20:28:54 1995
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 16:57:58 -0700
From: Michael Lorton <mlorton@eshop.com>
To: jimf@world.std.com
Cc: cmcmanis@scndprsn.Eng.Sun.COM, java-interest@java.Eng.Sun.COM
In-Reply-To: jim frost's message of Mon, 26 Jun 1995 16:47:47 -0400 <199506262047.AA12996@world.std.com>
|>Which brings us to my question: why no operator overloading in Java?
|
|My understanding was that it was a value/complexity tradeoff but either
|Arthur van Hoff or James Gosling can answer this question more completely.
Personally I'm not too keen on operator overloading; while it's useful
for extending the numeric types it makes people want to build things
like C++'s iostreams. Is the benefit really worth the cost?
(I'm only half joking.)
For the other half: I like the operator-overloading part of iostreams.
printf formatting was fine too, expressively, but it was dangerous and
slow. I find the Pascal/Java solution simply dull beneath description.
But, yes, operator-overloading does present temptations to the unwary.
What are the other expenses? It seems like a trivial addition to the
compiler; as people on comp.lang.c++ point out endlessly, it is
semantic sugar.
Michael ("Semantic sweettooth") Lorton
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