From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2003-09-23T16:12:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Operator overloading


"Johann Hibschman" <jhibschman@yahoo.com> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:41b772c.0309221105.26d32b4f@posting.google.com...
> "Robert Klemme" <bob.news@gmx.net> wrote in message
news:<bkmq5r$3dhd5$2@ID-52924.news.uni-berlin.de>...
>
> > You can't.  And you don't need to.  As others pointed out already,
Ruby
> > treats all the assignment arithmetic operators as shortcuts and
invokes
> > the appropriate operator.  So
>
> Er.  "You don't need to" is rather extreme.  What about numerical cases?
>
> i.e., if m is a large matrix, then "m += 1" and "m = m + 1" are rather
> different beasts, since the "obvioius" interpretation of the first
involves
> simply incrementing the matrix in place, while the second involves a
> copy.
>
> Is there a standard work-around for this?

Resort to methods with proper names (like "add!", "mult!" etc. Convention
is, that an exclamation mark denotes methods that modify the receiver).

Personally I feel very comfortable with Ruby not encouraging overloading
operators all the time as C++ does.  Readability doesn't always benefit
from overloading.  And there is nothing that can't be achieved with a
method call (from a functional perspective).

Regards

    robert