Jeff Flinn wrote:
Also given the growth of EDSL's and operator overloading in general are these names too domain specific? For example boost::filesystem overloads operator/ for concatenating a path: p / "file.txt".
Has thought been given to more agnostic names such as:
has_operator_star has_operator_slash has_operator_plus has_operator_minus ...
That's an interesting idea, but standardized names for the characters would be necessary. "Star" is colloquial; "asterisk" is more appropriate. Instead of "minus," "hyphen" seems more correct and what about the unary versus binary overloads? Here's a longer list to consider: has_operator_hyphen_unary has_operator_hyphen_binary has_operator_tilde has_operator_exclamation has_operator_percent has_operator_caret (not "circumflex" which is a diacritical) has_operator_ampersand has_operator_asterisk has_operator_pipe has_operator_left_guillemet? has_operator_right_guillemet? Since the guillemets are real characters, and the C++ operators are formed by two characters parsed as one token, using "guillemet" isn't correct. One could also use "chevron" which are sometimes doubled to represent guillemets, but the less-than and greater-than characters are not chevrons. Calling them "left shift" and "right shift" brings one full circle to naming the operators for the operations they represent on built-in types, while "insertion" and "extraction" are related to their use with IOStreams. I don't know what to call those. The contrary view to what you've suggested is to note in the documentation that the operators are named for their use with built-in types and leave it at that. _____ Rob Stewart robert.stewart@sig.com Software Engineer, Core Software using std::disclaimer; Susquehanna International Group, LLP http://www.sig.com IMPORTANT: The information contained in this email and/or its attachments is confidential. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately by reply and immediately delete this message and all its attachments. Any review, use, reproduction, disclosure or dissemination of this message or any attachment by an unintended recipient is strictly prohibited. Neither this message nor any attachment is intended as or should be construed as an offer, solicitation or recommendation to buy or sell any security or other financial instrument. Neither the sender, his or her employer nor any of their respective affiliates makes any warranties as to the completeness or accuracy of any of the information contained herein or that this message or any of its attachments is free of viruses.