OT Signature quote [was Re: Unrecognized escape sequences in string literals]

[Douglas Alan]

On Aug 14, 10:25 pm, Dave Angel <da... at ieee.org> wrote:

> Benjamin Kaplan wrote:

> > On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 12:42 PM, Douglas Alan <darkwate... at gmail.com>wrote:

> >> P.S. Overloading "left shift" to mean "output" does indeed seem a bit
> >> sketchy, but in 15 years of C++ programming, I've never seen it cause
> >> any confusion or bugs.

> > The only reason it hasn't is because people use it in "Hello World". I bet
> > some newbie C++ programmers get confused the first time they see << used to
> > shift.

People typically get confused by a *lot* of things when they learn a
new language. I think the better metric is how people fare with a
language feature once they've grown accustomed to the language, and
how long it takes them to acquire this familiarity.

> Actually, I've seen it cause confusion, because of operator precedence.  
> The logical shift operators have a fairly high level priority, so
> sometimes you need parentheses that aren't obvious.  Fortunately, most
> of those cases make compile errors.

I've been programming in C++ so long that for me, if there's any
confusion, it's the other way around. I see "<<" or ">>" and I think I/
O. I don't immediately think shifting. Fortunately, shifting is a
pretty rare operation to actually use, which is perhaps why C++
reclaimed it for I/O.

On the other hand, you are right that the precedence of "<<" is messed
up for I/O. I've never seen a real-world case where this causes a bug
in C++ code, because the static type-checker always seems to catch the
error. In a dynamically typed language, this would be a much more
serious problem.

|>ouglas

P.S. I find it strange, however, that anyone who is not okay with
"abusing" operator overloading in this manner, wouldn't also take
umbrage at Python's overloading of "+" to work with strings and lists,
etc. Numerical addition and sequence concatenation have entirely
different semantics.