UFCS for struct opCall?

[Maxim Fomin]

On Tuesday, 9 April 2013 at 19:08:51 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> I am abstracting their essence. If you think there was any 
> argument that does not fit the above description, feel free to 
> bring it up.

a) UFCS and overloading are distinct topics. One does not enforce 
other to work in a particular way. For example, UFCS does not 
mean that a.typeid should be rewritten as typeid(a) or foo!int 
can be written as int.foo. Judging by enhancement requests in 
bugzilla, there is trend for asking anything like 'a..b..c'  to 
be writable as 'a.b...c' in general. None of such ideas is 100% 
right per se, including operator overloading.

b) UFCSing operator overloading is a feature which can be easily 
and likely to broken. By easily broken I mean that despite the 
idea looks 'cool', its advantages evaporate when there are 
multiple opBinaries and other stuff. It is possible to rewrite 
conflicting function name to other and use it, but it isn't 
possible to rewrite conflicting basic expression in terms of 
other basic expressions. There is no possibility for 
S[my.bar.mod.opCall](). The idea blows up and you have to use 
function call as currently. By likely to be broken I mean higher 
probability to run in name conflict with operators than with 
regular methods (and it would happen very likely because idea 
seems to be popular).

By the way, not all operators can be overloaded because "... 
These operators [comma, ternary, && and || ] were considered to 
create more confusion than flexibility if ever overloaded..." 
which does not necessarily means that this decision is 
"incomplete" and "non sequitur".

>>>> Jonathan Davis doesn't like this. For more information I 
>>>> suggest to take
>>>> a look at the thread in Bugzilla.
>>>> ...
>>>
>>> There is not more information there, it's just given in a 
>>> blown up
>>> representation. He does not justify his opinion.
>>
>> That's not funny more. It is really interesting to hear from 
>> you saying
>> that somebody does not provide bases for opinions because it 
>> is you who
>> are known to post argument without justification ignoring 
>> everything
>> previous
>> (for ex.
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Possible_UDA_bug_190800.html).
>>
>
> I am flattered you went through the hassle of searching the 
> forums in order to build an irrelevant ad hominem argument.
> Note however, that the thread quoted contains justification for 
> every opinion I have posted.
> On a general note, NG conversations are not linear and there 
> may be race conditions.

I don't care of flattering you, but I do not like when arguments 
are distorted or described as being absent, or people are 
portrayed as having no idea what they are talking about.

Surely, I do understand advantages of the idea and understand why 
the idea is considered to be logical, I object not because being 
programming sadist, but because consider idea harmful and easy to 
abuse.