4 ms·

I don't see why it would be a terrible idea. It's pretty convenient if you're slicing a multidimensional array.

• throwawaymaths 1y ago
  except are you sure that's what it's doing? it could have been overloaded. you have to ask yourself that every time.
  • Doxin 1y ago
    Or you can assume it's implemented sanely. Yes if someone overrides $ and does something wildly wrong with it that'll get confusing. That's the fault of whoever wrote that code though, not of $ itself. You can also overload +, imagine the mayhem if someone did something weird with that. should we ban overloading operators altogether?
    • throwawaymaths 1y ago
      > Or you can assume it's implemented sanely excuse me, have you spent any time in tech? people fucking love to do clever shit that gets people in trouble. using NULL as a not-pointer value signalling absence (without safeguards) is probably the most notorious -- but at least useful, but if you want to get brain meltingly annoying and pervasive, we dont have to stray too far from the idea of operator overloading; c++'s << operator can just go to hell.
      • Doxin 1y ago
        I work in tech full time. I mostly write python code. Python similar to D allows you to override ~all operators. I have yet to run into an instance where someone has overridden operators to do something completely insane. Honestly the weirdest real use-case I've ran into is pathlib overriding division on path objects to instead mean concatenation. Which seems confusing until you realize it just means paths get written like `build_dir = root_dir / "build"` which is sensible enough. Weirdest not-real use case is of course the famous goto-in-python module which overrides attribute access in combination with unhinged dark magic to implement goto.
  • 1980phipsi 1y ago
    I've looked at a lot of D code, and I can't recall it ever being misused.