From: "trans.  (T. Onoma)" <transami@...>
Date: 2004-10-11T00:30:32+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

On Sunday 10 October 2004 10:55 am, Randy W. Sims wrote:
| 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.

I understand. Actually I've had a notion in the back of my head for awhile 
about this. Seems to me developers might be better off if they followed 
parallel tracks rather then serial tracks. Diagram:

  Serial Model

  0.x -> 1.0 -> 1.1 -> ... -> 2.0 -> 2.1 -> ... -> 3.0 -> ...

  
  Parallel Model

  0.x -> 1.0 -> 1.1 -> ... -> 1.x
          |
          V
         2.0 -> 2.1 -> ... -> 2.x
          |
          V
         3.0 -> ...

The idea is that bug-fixes and compatible-only changes move from left to 
right, all and others move down.  The only project I know that sort-of does 
this much is Linux, but even there we see a lot of back porting and what not.

| 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.

I think there is a balance to be found. Many of us has wanted an extra 
operator for this or that at one time or another. I tend to think that they 
would be used sparingly if available for precisely the reasons people 
suggested against them --but the "hard to read" arguments don't really 
convince me that it wouldn't be a good feature --in fact in some cases it 
would even make code clearer. And in fact that's why some people want this 
feature --not to obscure code, but to actually make it easier to read.

T.