Rant after trying Rust a bit

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 2 August 2015 at 19:02:22 UTC, Max Samukha wrote:
> On Sunday, 26 July 2015 at 23:29:18 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>
>> For example, the '+' operator. Rust traits sez "gee, there's a 
>> + operator, it's good to go. Ship it!" Meanwhile, you thought 
>> the function was summing some data, when it actually is 
>> creating a giant string, or whatever idiot thing someone 
>> decided to use '+' for.
>
> Number addition and string concatenation are monoid operations. 
> In this light, '+' for both makes perfect sense.

Well, using + for "adding" strings together does make sense on 
some level, which is why it's done in so many languages, and I 
don't think that it causes as much confusion as Walter sometimes 
seems to think (at least in C/C++-derived languages). That being 
said, I think that it's definitely an improvement that D has 
another operator for it. It makes it clearer when concatenation 
is occurring without having to figure out what types you're 
dealing with, and it allows user-defined code to have both an 
addition operator and a concatenation operator on the same type.

Where distinguishing between + and ~ would likely make a big 
difference though is dynamic languages that aren't strict with 
types and allow nonsense like "5" + 2. And in that case, I expect 
that Walter is completely right. It's just error-prone to use + 
for concatenation in cases like that, and providing a separate 
concatenation operator would reduce bugs.

Regardless, I definitely like the fact that we have ~ and ~= 
instead of reusing + and += for that. It's a small improvement, 
but it is an improvement.

- Jonathan M Davis