Pow Expressions - not worth the juice?

[jmh530]

On Tuesday, 3 February 2026 at 01:38:03 UTC, Lance Bachmeier 
wrote:
> On Monday, 2 February 2026 at 20:23:01 UTC, Sam Potter wrote:
>> On Monday, 2 February 2026 at 17:43:45 UTC, Walter Bright 
>> wrote:
>>> https://dlang.org/spec/expression.html#pow_expressions
>>>
>>> They're a bit of an oddball feature in D, in that it's the 
>>> only feature that relies on Phobos for its implementation.
>>>
>>> Time for it to go?
>>
>> Please no.
>>
>> Operator overloading for ^^ is a really nice quality of life 
>> improvement for numerical and scientific programming.
>>
>> All five major numerical programming languages support this: 
>> MATLAB, Python, Fortran, Julia, and R.
>
> We should have more operators, not fewer.

I have found that R’s custom infix operators are nice [1]. They 
have a good balance between allowing library writers to be 
expressible, as well as a bit of a warning that "here be dragons".

For those not familiar, putting an R example into a D context it 
would mean you could do something like

```
struct Foo
     double x;
     bool opBinary(string op)(double y)
         if (op == "%divisible%")
     {
         return x % y == 0 ? true : false;
     }
}
```
where the basically the `"op"` can be anything so long as it is 
delimited in a form like "%op%"

It would be even better if you could do something like (to my 
knowledge `opBinary` would need to be a member function).

```
bool opBinary(string op)(double x, double y)
     if (op == "%divisible%")
{
     return x % y == 0 ? true : false;
}
```

[1] https://www.datamentor.io/r-programming/infix-operator