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0 pointsChris_Newton13y ago0 comments

Given these limitations, and the fact that most languages have relatively few built-in operators to choose from, I find that just operator overloading isn't enough. You really want the ability to define new operators as well.

This is getting into blessing vs. curse territory, though. On the one hand, used well, a custom operator might enhance the benefits of allowing operator overloading in the first place. If your code is mathematical, you have an extended character set available, and you have good coding standards and keyboarding skills to match, then matching the operators/notation in the code to any related mathematical documentation has obvious advantages.

On the other hand, there are only so many obvious symbols available on most keyboards. Once those run out, you can resort to those extended characters, but they might not always be so unambiguous: most of us would recognise less-than-or-equal, but was that an empty set or just a slashed zero in the font Bill was using? The alternative is to start combining symbols, which again might make sense if say [[ ... ]] looks like whatever mathematical notation is standard in your field, but isn’t so great if you go all Haskell and define more-or-less every combination of three non-alphanumerical symbols in the universe to have some subtly different meaning... including from the same combination of symbols in the other library you’re using five lines later.

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swift13y ago

Actually I think Haskell does things pretty well on this one. People often complain about the operator-heavy nature of Haskell, but I find that after a while you're familiar with all of the popular operators and they just fade into the background, actually making the code feel much more clean than it would without them. They contribute greatly to the feeling of concise power that Haskell has.

Chris_NewtonOP13y ago

People often complain about the operator-heavy nature of Haskell, but I find that after a while you're familiar with all of the popular operators and they just fade into the background

With the everyday operators that everyone programming Haskell will learn very early, I agree it’s not a significant problem. Familiarity will surely overcome any lack of intuitive meaning very quickly. The same applies if you’re using “made up” operators but they reflect some intuitive syntax or conventional notation in whatever field you’re working in. In all of these cases, having a concise notation for frequently occurring concepts is surely a benefit, other things being equal.

However, as you start to represent more specialised or esoteric concepts, I wonder whether there are diminishing returns and increasing risks. For example, I think it is good general advice that identifiers in code should be pronounceable, but how do you pronounce $$!? For that matter, did I just write a $$! operator and a question mark, or a $$ operator and an informal confusion/sarcasm mark?

Here’s a Stack Overflow discussion I thought was relevant:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7746894/are-there-pronoun...

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