On Thursday 08 March 2007 20:02, Robert Fischer wrote:
> Which is exactly my point.  You should have to document all that, because
> they are genuinely different operations.  You have these operations, so why
> shouldn't you document them?  Or, better yet, abstract them and organize
> them.  By using operator overloading, you're sweeping under the rug genuine
> complexity -- something that my surprise later developers!

Because the distinction is purely incidental as it depends upon the language's 
choice of type system.

> When I see "+", I want to know what that means.  With operator overloading,
> I don't know.

The same can be said of type inference. Then you're advocating explicit type 
annotations everywhere.

> An IDE might help me out there, but that's just polishing a 
> genuine ding on code readbility and maintainability.  Why should I have to
> rely on an IDE to make sense of my code?

This is precisely why I rely so heavily on Tuareg's type throwback in Emacs.

If you sacrifice your development environment (even if it is just emacs) then 
productivity goes down. Failing to embrace a future of graphical IDEs is a 
bad idea, IMHO.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists