expression templates

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 30.03.2011 22:34, schrieb Dmitry Olshansky:
> On 30.03.2011 2:14, so wrote:
>> On Tue, 29 Mar 2011 22:56:10 +0300, dsimcha <dsimcha at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Occasionally i encounter this argument that operator overloading is
>> bad thing when it is abused.
>> I don't overload operators offensively myself, i use dot(vec, vec)
>> cross(vec, vec) for example because there is not a suitable operator
>> and these names suits much better.
>>
>> On the other hand i am not against languages being flexible, quite
>> contrary i don't call it a language if it is not.
>> OO is an impressive tool and we need tools like this for better
>> libraries. You can't change a language for a long time but you can
>> update a library in very short period of time.
>>
>> vec add(a, b) { return a.x - b.x }
>> vec operator+(a, b) { return a.x - b.x }
>>
>> Is there a difference?
>
> The second one plays havoc with parsing :) It's not that it's such a big
> problem but ..
> BTW when does + denotes a difference?
>

(Probably) Never..
I think his point is that using a bad operator-overload (overload the 
"+" operator for subtracting) isn't worse than using a bad function name 
(like "add" when you're really subtracting).

Cheers,
- Daniel