From: "Randy W. Sims" Date: 2004-10-10T23:55:36+09:00 Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch On 10/10/2004 10:01 AM, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote: > Know what noise is? Another word for static. Know what static is? Something > that never changes. You know what something that never changes is? > S T A B L E D E P E N D A B L E C O M P A T I B L E Like standards based languages: C, C++, Ada, etc. Actually, this is the wrong argument. I don't think anyone is against change. But some of us feel that there are some potential problems or dangers associated with this particular change. A long time ago I was reading one of Bjarne Stroustrup's books or on his website where he proposed user defined operators. At the time I was excited about it and looked forward to it. Unicode provides lots of neat symbols that would make meaningful operators. If this patch allowed that, I might be more inclined to agree with it. But that's the heart of the problem: assigning meaning to an arbitrary combination of symbols makes the resulting code hard to interpret. Among the objections listed, I think this is the hardest to overcome. Some have compared operators to methods, but that comparison doesn't really hold. IMO the only comparison there is if you used method names like 'sdkjfo' - arbitrary combinations of characters with no inherant semantics. Regards, Randy.