Definable operators (was: Problems with Hardware, Languages, and Compilers)

>[.... I used IMP72, a language where
>you could add any operations you wanted, and it was awful. -John]


Why was it awful? It seems to me that mathematicians would be quite
frustrated if they were restricted to using + - * and / in their
papers... Granted, it would require some discipline (what language
feature doesn't? :-), but we seem to be pretty good at understanding
traditional math notation where it's normal to define appropriate
operators for the objects under consideration. But I've never used a
language that allowed operator definition....
--
Richard Rogers (rrogers@cs.washington.edu)
Computer Facilities Director -- Northwest Center for Environmental Education
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/rrogers/nceepg.html
[IMP72 let you stick BNF in your programs so you could add any syntax
you wanted. The problem was that everyone did, so before you could
read an IMP72 program you first had to figure out what language it was
written in. Experience with C++ tells me that even operator
overloading can easily lead to unmaintainable code if you can no
longer tell at a glance what each operator does. -John]


--

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