Overloading relational operators separately; thoughts?

[Minty Fresh via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 30 September 2016 at 19:46:35 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
> Claiming that operator overloading only applies to a specific 
> user-defined type makes it worse. Having it work one way for 
> three types, a different way for four other types, and a third 
> way for yet another type doesn't sound like a minor thing.

But operators already behave in different way for different 
types. Built-in types inclusive. The most trivial and nit-picky 
difference would be between integer types and floating point 
types.

ie. Division between two integers yields an integer, division 
between two floats yields a float, but then division between an 
integer and a float also yields a float.
Alternatively, the bit-shift operators `<<` and `>>` don't 
function at all for floats.
But then we have also wonderful floating point values like `NaN` 
and `Infinity` for which arithmetic and relational operators 
behave differently altogether.

Another would static arrays, versus dynamic arrays, versus 
associative arrays. The first two support concatenation via `~`, 
only the second supports in-place concatenation `~=`, and the 
last has no notion of concatenation at all.

A counter argument that might be raised is that those are 
different types altogether. They are intended to behave in 
different ways entirely. Completely different data structures. 
Their similarities are only superficial.

And such a counter argument would be absolutely correct. Markedly 
so. They are completely different types.
The same is true of user-defined types. Their behavior should not 
be equated to (nor expected to be like) the behaviors of types 
they only resemble superficially.

> But have fun debating design decisions that were made long ago 
> and aren't going to change.

That's exactly the kind of decision making you see in C++ and 
PHP. Metathesiophobia would be one way of describing it. Stubborn 
blindness to real world usage is more contextually appropriate 
though, I feel.