3 ms·
"Made it possible", or "made it look like R"? add() vs. + is just a mild inconvenience IMO compared to the inconvenience of overloading abuse that I normally s
by qwer 10y ago
"Made it possible", or "made it look like R"? add() vs. + is just a mild inconvenience IMO compared to the inconvenience of overloading abuse that I normally see ( like sqlalchemy IMO). I'd personally rather know what to expect from an operator.
- goatlover 10y agoIt's not just arithmetic, it's also being able to use comparison operators to filter, which is really convenient. What languages like R do at the syntactic level is make the programming language closer to math, where you can do things like add vectors or multiply matrices using simple operators.
- goatlover 10y agoAlso, it adds up (no pun intended). You're right that add() vs. + for a simple case when you only do it a few times is no big deal. But it is a bigger deal when you do it a lot, and the arithmetic can be a little more complicated. We could by analogy apply this argument to adding integers and floats together. It's more convenient to use the + operator for that, but someone could argue that an add() function is just a minor inconvenience, so why bother overloading the + operator? That is until you have to use it hundreds of times.