From: Chris Parker <chrisgparker@...>
Date: 2006-03-04T02:28:41+09:00
Subject: Re: Confused about != operator overloading

Thanks for the replies everyone.

It is helpful but kind of disappointing.  I'll explain more about my
problem and maybe there is some clean solution.

So I am trying to write a new language on top of Ruby (without writing
any C) for Constraint Satisfaction Problems.

X1 == X2, which X1 is of class CSPVar will return a CSPConstraint that
contains the information about that constraint.  Obviously, I need to
overload != because returning something like true or false makes no
sense.  I am using != needs to return a CSPConstraint object reflecting
the information about the constraint, not true or false.  After I have
all of the variables, domains, and constraints, I then solve the
problem.

The obvious but incredibly ugly solution is something like: X1.ne(X2).
Since I got ==, +, -, *, / all working like operators, it would be nice
to get != to work as well.

Let me know if you have any ideas.  Also, I am really struggling to
understand why != can't be overloaded.  I understand providing a
default != which is just not(==), but completely not allowing the
overloading of != seems strange.

Chris