Tuesday 11 January 2005 — This is almost 20 years old. Be careful.
Bjarne Stroustrup has written a very interesting paper outlining some radical ideas for operator overloading: Generalizing Overloading for C++2000. He includes the notion of overloading no operator at all, so that “x y” can mean “x*y” the way physicists and mathematicians want it to mean.
Note: I got about halfway through this before realizing it was a joke...
Comments
Still, even the composite operators idea sounds half-feasible... I wonder if anyone has ever tried it
Bjarne isn't trying to hide anything here. Near the end he says that a preprocessor that implements this facility is available. The link makes it clear that this paper was April Fools joke. The ideas got so bizarre by that point that only the humor impaired would have taken it seriously.
He goes on to say that "several of the suggestions are technically feasible, but that doesn't mean that they would be good or that we have to implement them."
It's title there was "A proposal regarding invisible logic for object-oriented languages".
I got about a 1/4 of the way thru it, then went back, looked at the title again, and said "duh!" :)
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