GCC 4.6.0 released

GCC 4.6.0 released

Posted Mar 29, 2011 1:05 UTC (Tue) by mtall12 (guest, #73924)
In reply to: GCC 4.6.0 released by cmccabe
Parent article: GCC 4.6.0 released

Frankly, I think operator overloading is confusing and ugly. It's a Perl-style "let's save 5 seconds of typing now, but spend 50 minutes scratching our heads a few months later over what this code REALLY does."

Sorry, that's a non-argument. Using the same logic I could say that using the "traditional" function call of foo(a,b) is confusing and ugly, because I'll need to spend 50 minutes deciphering what foo() does.

Operator overloading is a very useful shorthand for function calls that can make the code far more readable and hence easier to maintain (translation: less bugs). This is especially true when writing scientific applications (though certainly not limited to them). With a decent matrix library (eg. Armadillo or ITPP), C++ allows things like:

matrix A, B, C, D;
A = (0.1*B + C) * D;

while in Java you have to resort to:

A = B;
A.scalar_multiply(0.1);
A.add(C);
A.matrix_multiply(D);

or

A = matrix_multiply(add(scalar_multiply(0.1, B), C), D);

Now imagine the above style for a far more complicated expression.

Let's also not forget that through C++ templates one can implement expression optimization, where operations like (0.1*B + C) can be turned into one loop, thereby providing execution speeds generally not doable in Java (ie. without specialized functions).

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