> In a dynamically typed language, this would be a + b. In a statically typed language, once you consider overflow and underflow, you will likely have a hundred lines of code.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/52376716/c-overloading-o...

literally a single line of code to overload an operator.

anyway, if you don't consider error states in your dynamic implementation and you do this in static then yes, it could be simpler. But static doesn't force you to consider error conditions - just like this C++ example does not.

and yes, if you fall back on javascript notions of default cross-type arithmetic (1 + "1" = ?) then you will get something, and if you take great care to structure your code you may get something useful as a side-effect, but, this is not meaningfully different from the error-state for most people. Getting [] or "11" isn't the expected outcome unless you've come to expect that quirk of javascript, and is something that a static compiler would rightfully complain about - because a user asking for an undefined operation computed across incompatible types seems like a classic type error. If it's not, then just define the operators that are meaningful to you - and you could define it as an interface if you wanted it to work with a bunch of classes etc.

Again though, the complaint elsewhere that "a lot of this debate just ends up being dynamic programmers who are unaccustomed to using static types at all and think it must be so super burdensome all the time" seems pretty accurate. Defining custom operators is not something that occupies even 1% of my time in any static language.