I'm reminded of Knuth's six character critique of C++... a < b > c; (from Dr. Dobbs, many years ago) Can you determine the function of that statement without

I'm reminded of Knuth's six character critique of C++... a < b > c; (from Dr. Dobbs, many years ago) Can you determine the function of that statement without knowing the types of the variables? No? That's because there's a parse problem in C++. If they had only used, say, [< and >] rather than < and > for template declaration, it could have parsed cleanly. Overloading operators for unrelated functionality is a dangerous and usually unnecessary practice.