[DonHopkins]

It reminds me of one of Bertrand Myer's many criticisms of C++ that I read in his book on Eiffel. (Almost every page of his book made fun of C++ in some way -- it was a delightful read!)

He pointed out that there was no reason for C++ to have both "." and "->", because the compiler always knew which one was required, and it only gave the programmer the opportunity to make a mistake, and a lot of extra effort changing every line of code if you change your mind about whether to use a pointer or not.

The definition of whether a member is a pointer or an inlined struct/object should only be one place in the code: in the class declaration, not scattered around every line of code in the program that uses it.

C++'s excuse was that it was trying to be compatible with C. Of course Java side-stepped the problem by not supporting embedded structs, but C# got it right.

[taejo]

And now you can't do it in C++ any more because you can overload operator->

[DonHopkins]

I vaguely remember that there was some annoying guy on comp.lang.c++ years ago who relentlessly campaigned for "operator .", because he was sure that it would somehow make C++ amazingly powerful and easy to use. But many people seemed to disagree with him and had problems with it, because it never happened.

Anybody remember what the controversial benefits and problems of "operator ." were? Here's something I just found about that:

https://isocpp.org/blog/2016/02/a-bit-of-background-for-the-...

But that's coming from the same madman who wrote the proposal for "Generalized Overloading for C++2000" that actually let you overload whitespace with "operator ' '".

http://www.stroustrup.com/whitespace98.pdf

[taejo]

Whitespace overloading was an April Fools' joke