On Tuesday 28 July 2009 8:27:53 pm Richard O'Keefe wrote:
Right. That settles it: TDNR is a bad idea. Half fun and full earnest.
I'm a fan of overloading as done in Ada, but the way C++ does it has always struck me as a mix of under-useful and over-complex, and my experience with it in practice has not been that marvellous. (C++ has far too many types that are _sort of_ compatible, but only sort of.)
Amusingly enough, one of the major items going into C++0x was concepts, which are an effort to add type class-alike restrictions to C++'s current completely ad-hoc overloading. They were only recently dropped due to disagreements about certain details (I think I read that people couldn't agree whether programmers should be forced to declare the analogue of class instances, or whether the compiler should figure it out, but I haven't paid close attention, so that may be inaccurate). -- Dan