Feature request: Path append operators for strings

[TommiT]

On Wednesday, 3 July 2013 at 12:24:33 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Tuesday, 2 July 2013 at 22:28:24 UTC, TommiT wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 2 July 2013 at 21:48:54 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 7/2/2013 1:47 PM, TommiT wrote:
>>>> Division operator for strings doesn't make any sense,
>>>
>>> That's why overloading / to do something completely unrelated 
>>> to division is anti-ethical to writing understandable code. 
>>> The classic example of this is the overloading of << and >> 
>>> for stream operations in C++.
>>
>> I've never thought of it like that. At some point I remember 
>> writing a vector type which overloaded its binary * operator 
>> to mean dot product (or cross product, I can't remember). So, 
>> you can overload an operator, but you can't overload the 
>> meaning of an operator.
>
> This is something I was discussing with a friend recently, and 
> we agreed it would be cool if there were set of operators with 
> no definition until overloaded, so you could use e.g. (.) for 
> dot product, (*) for cross product, (+) (or maybe [+]?) for 
> matrix add, etc. instead of overloading things that already 
> have specific, well-understood meaning.
>
> -Wyatt

I don't see why we couldn't add the actual unicode ∙ and × 
characters to the language, make them operators and give them the 
fixed meaning of dot product and cross product respectively.

Wouldn't + be the correct operator to use for matrix addition. 
What happens when matrices are added is quite different from when 
real values are added, but the meaning of + is still addition for 
the both of them.