> An operator can be overloaded in C plus plus, but right now operators in the Java pro-
gramming language can not be overloaded by the programmer, though names of methods
may be overloaded. I would like to change that
It’s a shame that he lost this battle. Operator overloading really does make it a lot nicer to design certain kinds of libraries.
I have said in the past, and will say now, that I think it would be a good thing for the Java programming language to add generic types and to let the user define overloaded operators.
He did get the generic types though, I think that was well over a decade ago now
i mean okay but also it makes it impossible to have an open source ecosystem with shared libraries because suddenly things dont mean the same thing in one system vs another. i was interviewing at Jane St and realized their OCaml completely doesnt work with the rest of the world - and its fine if you're Jane St i guess but that really sucks for the "health" of a language ecosystem.
? In both cases, libraries will only clash if both define a function with the same name taking an A and a B. The only difference is that it is called + in the former case, and plus in the latter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0
It's Guy Steele[0]'s keynote at the 1998 ACM[1] OOPSLA[2] conference.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele_Jr.
[1] Association for Computing Machinery
[2] The 13th annual ACM SIGPLAN[3] Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications.
[3] SIGPLAN is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on programming languages.
It’s a shame that he lost this battle. Operator overloading really does make it a lot nicer to design certain kinds of libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Valhalla_(Java_languag...
https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/
I have said in the past, and will say now, that I think it would be a good thing for the Java programming language to add generic types and to let the user define overloaded operators.
He did get the generic types though, I think that was well over a decade ago now
This was in Java 5, in 2004. So two decades!
There’s a Java compiler plugin[1] that muscles in operator overloading pretty comprehensively, and works with all LTS JDKs.
1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/tree/master/man...