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by mgaunard 1640 days ago
Consider a + b + c.

When you read the code, you know what the types of a, b and c are. You know whether they're built-in types, and therefore whether those operator expressions are actually function calls.

Nothing is hidden, so long as the programmer doesn't make invalid assumptions based on his experience with other, different languages.
1 comments
klyrs 1640 days ago
Your point appears to be "if you know the entire codebase, nothing is hidden." This is tautologically true of all languages. If you're accustomed to working on small projects, then that attitude will work out for you. If you work on large codebases, it isn't always so easy, especially if folks use a lot of template magic.

In your case, if a, b, and c are all the same type, then b+c can return a completely different type, and you'll need to track that down before you know what type a+(b+c) will have. And in that case, (a+b)+c can have a different type from a+(b+c). If you've memorized the associativity rules for the language, you'll know what to expect -- but it's not at all obvious from the notation.

And, sure. If you know absolutely everything about the language and everything about the codebase, you can make accurate predictions about the behavior of any given line. But if you're coming into a new codebase, there's no way to know at a glance what a given line of code is going to cost. That's what folks are calling hidden complexity.

Oh -- and thanks to the auto keyword, you don't always know the types of a, b, and c without hunting things down.

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mgaunard 1640 days ago
You don't need to know the whole codebase to understand a piece of code, just what the declarations of the names being referenced in that piece of code are (in C++, a name may be a macro, a type, a template, a variable or a function, and depending on which kind, may have all kinds of other properties attached).

Yes, you need to look at the declarations of names to know what the resulting type of expressions involving those names is. I don't see that as being surprising or unusual. The same is also true in C.

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