Argumnentation against external function operator overloading is unconvincing

Timon Gehr via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Sep 21 12:01:40 PDT 2016


On 21.09.2016 19:57, HaraldZealot wrote:
>
>
> So if someone has real rationale not to have operator overloading as
> external function I'm curios to arguments.
>
>
> [1] http://dlang.org/rationale.html

There is no technical reason that would make the implementation of this 
feature difficult, if that is your question.

Basically, the rationale is: external operators cannot be used in 
generic code that does not import the module defining the operators. C++ 
works around this using ADL. Walter (justifiably) does not like ADL, 
hence the limitation.

(I don't agree with that line of reasoning: obviously this is not only 
an issue for operators, but for any UFCS function; operators are mere 
syntactic sugar.)


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