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Comment by mh7 | Hacker News Reader

You don't know what the function called "add" does either.

There's no reason for the name "+" to be anymore special than "add" - especially in any language supporting unicode identifiers which allows even more crazy names.

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But with "add" I'm explicitly calling a function.

> There's no reason for the name "+" to be anymore special than "add"

This is debatable. I want "+" to do just an addition.

Also a function "add", depending on the context, can mean different things.

See, framing it as a personal preference makes much more sense. Of course disallowing nontrivial work in operators will also mean you can't concatenate strings in them, so you will have few languages to choose from.

Sorry. I don't know if you are saying that you won't be able to concatenate strings without operators, or if you choose a language just because it allows you to use a "a = b + c" form with strings.

For the first case, of course you can create something like:

    str1.append(str2);

For the second... I don't know what to say.

> framing it as a personal preference

But follow my logic for a moment: if "str3 = str1 + str2" concatenates a string, what "str3 = str1 - str2" should do?

(Yes I know there is no minus operator for std::string)

And "str3 = str1 * str2"?

And "str3 = str1 % str2"?

I never said, that it is impossible to work without operator overloading (actually the opposite). Just that it is a very common feature in most programming languages, and I don't understand why an experienced developer would be confused by it. Even in maths expressions (where the operators come from), you have this behavior. If you multiply two matrices, it does something completely different. The result could be huge and thus in computing world require huge memory allocation. Also you can multiply matrices, but you can't divide them. The primary school level math you seem to be limiting the world to is not practical.

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