Re: [RFC] Userspace operator overloading

Hi! > - The individual symbolic operators, with no intrinsic meaning - e.g. > overloading . for concatenation on strings but dot-product for > vectors; or a DSL overloading << and >> for "into" and "out > of". Please no. I know it looks fancy and some languages love it, but for a person not in on the joke reading such code is a nightmare - it's basically gibberish until you learn all the types and which meaning each of the types assigns to operators. I mean, I could be maybe talked into having users overload "+" to mean "add some kind of objects that are like numbers but not actually integers" because my intuition still works there even if I don't know the exact type. But if someone thinks it's super-cool to override + to make it add element to the cache object - please no. It's way worse than just using plain old ->addObject(). You may save couple of keystrokes and make your code completely incomprehensible for people who come after you. I know DSLs have its niche but I seriously doubt average PHP user implements a lot of DSLs that are required to work natively on PHP engine. -- Stas Malyshev smalyshev@gmail.com