• neroden twcny.rr.com (5/5) May 01 2002 Just discovered D. My first question is, why overload ~ and ~= for stri...
• Walter (17/22) May 01 2002 course

neroden twcny.rr.com writes:

Just discovered D.  My first question is, why overload ~ and ~= for string
concatenation?  These are very odd choices.  The natural choices are of course
+ and +=.  If you don't want to do that because of a conflict with pointer
arithmetic, consider that pointer arithmetic without intermediate conversion to
integer types is a horrifying misfeature. :-)

"Walter" <walter digitalmars.com> writes:

<neroden twcny.rr.com> wrote in message
news:aaova1$srd$1 digitaldaemon.com...
 Just discovered D.  My first question is, why overload ~ and ~= for string
 concatenation?  These are very odd choices.  The natural choices are of

course
 + and +=.  If you don't want to do that because of a conflict with pointer
 arithmetic, consider that pointer arithmetic without intermediate

conversion to
 integer types is a horrifying misfeature. :-)

The reason was to save + and += on arrays to do an element-by-element add,
such as a matrix add.

Overloading + to mean "add" in once context and "concatenate" in another
leads to ambiguity bugs like:
    "123" + 4

Does this produce the string:
    "1234"
or the number:
    127
?

There is no such ambiguity in D's approach, and so no need to invent an
arbitrary, obscure, and forgettable rule about what to do in ambiguous
cases.