Re: wacky object idea

<warning> This post contains explicit material. Don't display to children under 3 years of age. </warning> At 02:09 30/08/2000, Francis Smit wrote:

What is the WTF factor??

"What The Fuck" factor. As in, how likely is the end user to stare at his screen and say in a pissed off tone 'What the fuck is going on?!' when he bumps into this particular feature.

only if misused and who picks up libraries that abuse the language?

What we're saying is basically that overloaded operators are 'seductive'. They encourage you to misuse them.

yes but this is an abuse I have never seen this sort of thing in C++ if one codes like that most people will choose not to know you, I sure would since there is no clear relationship between division and string splitting.

Often, logical functions seem to map into operators. However, different people map them onto different operators, if at all. In this case, once explained, it makes perfect sense that dividing the string to substrings based on a certain delimiter would use the division operator, and that's what the developer thought to himself when he programmed this class. As you saw, it's not necessarily trivial to figure it out, though.

Negative if one only uses sane overloads, (or as in the case of inserters "<<" ones which are well know alternate meanings), then no clarity is lost. The development of new alternate meanings is of course a little ticklish but, there are some sane rules that can be derived the above example is fairly unlikely to take of as it involves not only the overloading of the operator / as an operator but the conceptual over loading of a well known mathematical operator, the operator << how ever is much simpler, "<<" is not exactly an every day symbol as it is, so that the conceptual overloading of it as both a shift and a insert operator, is much easier to swallow, in mathematics (my first love) almost any symbol can be conceptually overloaded, if PHP is going to be a sissy on these issues then I can only say it's a pity, PHP shows much promise but I can always look for something with a more practical and realistic out look, or create it myself, that's the beauty of living in a free open source universe.

PHP isn't a math language (we need a template for 'PHP isn't a <YOUR FAVOURITE LANGUAGE TYPE HERE> language'). The limited positive power of operator overloading won't show in PHP, and there's much more to lose than to gain (people *WILL* misuse it, more often than using it properly, as there are very limited good usages for it, and people very often use 'cool' features, whether they need them or not). In my opinion, the ability to fork isn't one of the nicer things about open source, it's actually one of the worst things about it. But obviously, by definition, everyone can decide for themselves. In my opinion, I think that now that PHP is a well-established language, we need to move off the state-of-mind that looks for more and more features to add to the language level. When was the last time something was added to the language level of Perl? Or even of C++ for that matter? It's time to try and stop making revolutionary changes in every miniversion. PHP got to where it is because people like it, we arrived at something that works and that's good. Changing it all the time risks losing that. Zeev -- Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> http://www.zend.com/