Re: [Vala] Operator overloading

[Levi Bard <taktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktak gmail com>]

> > At the same time, by having operator overloading we can have our
> > own implementation for any arithmetic operation over any kind of
> > object which will make Vala a more flexible language and this will
> > open lot of possibilities in video game programming.

This is, at best, syntax sugar. It doesn't add any flexibility to vala
(simply calling a method named "operator+" instead of a method called
"add"), and adds great potential for confusion. How this relates to
video game programming is beyond me.

> > Another nice feature would be to add an 'auto-cast' capability using
> > code attributes over the class definitions to simplify the code writing
> > when a cast is necessary to be done. for example:
>
> This is flexible in writing, but unreadable for the reader. To
> understand string str = obj, the reader has to find the definition of
> Object, search for all autocast annotations, then guess which is which.
> > [...]
> The more complex the situation gets, the more difficult for the reader
> to understand the code. Verbosity is not always bad, given that our
> brains are not compilers.

Here, I agree with Yu Feng.
In addition, these features, while questionable by themselves, become
nightmarish in combination.
What happens when using overloaded operators  to add a Foo and a Bar,
both of which are implicitly castable to each other? What about when
there is a complex graph of implicitly castable types?
Sure, it's possible to define rules for these sorts of complicated
situations, but that means that the reader has to navigate that
ruleset every time that code is used, and the developer has to
renavigate that ruleset every place it's used every time any
contiguous code changes.

A good programming language makes it easy to create maintainable code
and to maintain and reuse existing codebases, not just to spew out
unreadable throwaways using a minimal number of characters.

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