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Re: looking at generic

Rolf Howarth wrote:

Since Java IS overloading operators (yes you can ADD strings), why are you
against operator overloading ?

There's a huge difference between built-in operator overloading (which every language since Fortran has had) and user-defined operator overloading. The latter leads to confusion that the former doesn't because

1. Everyone agrees on what the built-in operators do with the built-in types.
2. It's immediately obvious when reading code what the built-in operators do.

This is not the case with user-defined operator overloading. Outside of a few very mathematical cases like complex numbers, you rapidly run into things like someone adding two database records together, and then you begin wondering just what the semantics of that operation are. Method names normally provide more explicit information about the nature of the operation they're performing.

--
Elliotte Rusty Harold  email@hidden
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
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