> The first programming language that used overloaded operators I really got into was Scala, and I still love it. I love that instead of Java's x.add(y); I can overload + so that it calls .add when between two objects of type a. It of course has to be used responsibly, but it makes a lot of code really more readable.

The problem, for me, with overloaded operators in something like C++ is that it frequently feels like an afterthought.

Doing "overloaded operators" in Lisp (CLOS + MOP) has much better "vibes" to me than doing overloaded operators in C++ or Scala.

Exactly, not allowing operator overload leads to Java hell, where we need verbose functions for calls that should be '+' or similar.

I think it's fine when the language has sufficiently strict types for string concatenation.

Unfortunately, many languages allow `string + int`, which is quite problematic. Java is to blame for some of this.

And C++ is even worse since literals are `const char[]` which decays to pointer.

Languages okay by my standard but not yours include: Python, Ruby.

Alternatively, any implementation of operator+ should have a notional identity element, an inverse element and be commutative.

Tangential, but Lua is the most write-only language I have had pleasure working with. The implementation and language design are 12 out of 10, top class. But once you need to read someone else's code, and they use overloads liberally to implement MCP and OODB and stuff, all in one codebase, and you have no idea if "." will index table, launch Voyager, or dump core, because everything is dispatched at runtime, it's panic followed by ennui.

> string concatenation should have its own operator,

It does: |

That character was put in ASCII specifically for concatenation in PL/1.

Then came C.

Those languages need a dedicated operator because they are loosely typed which would make it ambiguous like + in JavaScript.

But C++ doesn't have that problem. Sure, a separate operator would have been cleaner (but | is already used for bitwise or) but I have never seen any bug that resulted from it and have never felt it to be an issue when writing code myself.

PHP overloads operators in other ways though.

But why, where does it become a problem?

This is so sad obvious it’s painful.

Arithmetic addition and sequence concatenation are very very different.

——

Scala got this right as well (except strings, Java holdover)

Concatenation is ++

Depends on what you're trying to understand.

Let's say I have matrices, and I've overloaded * for multiplying a matrix by a matrix, and a matrix by a vector, and a matrix by a number. And now I write

  a = b * c;

  a = mat_mult(b,c);

But if I take the exact same line and try to understand exactly which functions get called, because I'm worried about numerical stability or performance or something, then the first approach hides the details and the second one is easier to understand.

This is always the way it goes with abstraction. Abstraction hides the details, so we can think at a higher level. And that's good, when you're trying to think at the higher level. When you're not, then abstraction just hides what you're really trying to understand.

> we get extremely hard to understand code

The thing is code without operator overloading is also hard to understand because you might have this math thing (BigIntegers, Matrices) and you can't use standard notation.

There is usually another operator used for concatenation in math though: | or || or ⊕

The first two are already used for bitwise and logical or and the third isn't available in ASCII so I still think overloading + was a reasonable choice and doesn't cause any actual problems IME.