opStar

[Michel Fortin]

On 2007-11-10 09:27:30 -0500, "Janice Caron" <caron800 at googlemail.com> said:

>> Smart pointers will have to be done a different (and hopefully better)
>> way in D.
> 
> Well here's to that. Looking forward to finding out what it is.

    a.opStar.b

But seriously, operator overloading's goal is to allow the programmer 
to use a consistent syntax for native and non-native types. It seem to 
me that opStar is pretty limited compared to other operators which can 
be overriden. Not only it doesn't allow you to use a simple syntax for 
calling aggregate's members -- as in `a.b` instead of `(*a).b` -- but 
since D doesn't have a reference type as you have in C++, implementing 
something as simple as `*a = b` is going to be pretty complicated for 
any non-object value (objects are reference types in D).

So, I'm left wondering about why this operator was made overridable in 
the first place if it's so limited.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/