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by taejo 3030 days ago
And now you can't do it in C++ any more because you can overload operator->
1 comments

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

Whitespace overloading was an April Fools' joke