i mean okay but also it makes it impossible to have an open source ecosystem with shared libraries because suddenly things dont mean the same thing in one system vs another. i was interviewing at Jane St and realized their OCaml completely doesnt work with the rest of the world - and its fine if you're Jane St i guess but that really sucks for the "health" of a language ecosystem.

▲ Someone 3 months ago | parent [-]

Why would

  a + b

suffer more from this than

  plus(a,b)

? In both cases, libraries will only clash if both define a function with the same name taking an A and a B. The only difference is that it is called + in the former case, and plus in the latter.

▲ mojifwisi 3 months ago | parent [-]

It's syntactically more straightforward to resolve the issue of clashing definitions through namespacing with functions compared to operators.

The following is pretty standard:

    foo::plus(a, b) // or foo.plus(a, b)
    bar::plus(a, b) // or bar.plus(a, b)

Whereas this is more awkward:

    a foo::+ b // or a foo.+ b
    a bar::+ b // or a bar.+ b

	▲	Someone 3 months ago \| parent [-]
		I would think a rule “a module that defines an operator overload must introduce at least one of the types involved” would prevent that problem, and still allow most, if not all, good uses of operator overloading.