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oopprogramming-languagesoperator-overloading

Operator overloading - is it really reasonable to forbid?


Java forbids operator overloading, but coming from C++ I do not see any reason for that. In languages where operator symbols are symbols as any other, same rules apply to "+" as to"plus" and there is no problem. So what is the point?

Edit: To be more concrete, show me which disadvantage overloaded "+" may have over overloaded "equals".


Solution

  • OK, I'll try my hand at this under the assumption that Gabriel Ščerbák is doing this for better reasons than railing against a language.

    The issue for me is one of manageable complexity: How much of the code in front of me do I have to decode vs. simply read?

    In most conventional languages, upon seeing the expression a + b I know what is going to happen. The variables a and b will be added together. I'm pretty confident that behind the scenes the code will be very concise, very fast native machine code that adds the two numbers, whether the numbers are short integers or double-precision or some mixture of the two. (In some languages I may have to also assume that these could be strings being concatenated, but that's a rant for an entirely different question -- but one that flavours this rant if you peer at it from the right angle.)

    When I make my own user-defined type -- say the omnipresent Complex type (and why Complex isn't a standard data type in modern languages is way the Hell beyond me, but that, again, is a rant for a different question) -- if I overload an operator (or, rather, if the operator is overloaded for me -- I'm using a library, say), short of peering very closely at the code I will not know that I'm now calling (possibly-virtual) methods on objects instead of having very tight, concise code generated for me behind the scenes. I will not know of the hidden conversions, the hidden temporary variables, the ... well, everything that goes along with writing many operators. To find out what's really going on in my code I have to pay very close attention to every line and keep track of declarations that may be three screens away from my current location in the code. To say that this impedes my understanding of the code flowing before my eyes is an understatement. Important details are being lost because the syntactic sugar is making things taste too tasty.

    When I'm forced to use explicit methods on the objects (or even static methods or global methods where that applies) this is a signal to me, while I'm reading, that tells me of the potential cost overheads and bottlenecks and the like. I know, without even having to think for an instant, that I'm dealing with a method, that I've got dispatching overhead, that I may have temporary object creation and deletion overhead, etc. Everything's in front of me right before my eyes -- or at least enough indicators are in front of me that I know to be more careful.

    I'm not intrinsically opposed to operator overloading. There are times when it makes code clearer, yes indeed, especially when you have complicated calculations over many baffling expressions. I can understand, however, exactly why someone might not want to put that into their language.

    There is a further reason not to like operator overloading from the language designer's viewpoint. Operator overloading makes for very, very, very difficult grammars. C++ is already infamous for being nigh-unparseable and some of its constructs, like operator overloading, are the cause of it. Again from the viewpoint of someone writing the language I can fully understand why operator overloading was left off as a bad idea (or a good idea that's bad in implementation).

    (This is all, of course, in addition to the other reasons you've already rejected. I'll submit my own overloading of operator-,() in my old C++ days in that stew just to be really annoying.)