| > You can predict the outcome very well Not always. BTW, I don't know if you noticed it, but I was exagerating to make a point. > Of course you could do something in that operator that nobody would expect to happen inside it To me, this is the problem. For example, I do embedded. I have to know with a certain precision what is going on in my program. It's a very different thing to call a bad-named or badly-done function. It's an unlucky case... I guess?... But if I use an operator, there might be hidden code there I have to see. Yes, I know you can use "=" to copy a struct. But also "a = b + c" might be doing something slow, like re-allocating internal pointers and making copies, allocating new objects, etc. I have to read the code to see what it will do. Believe me, I have done it with inherited embedded C++ projects. |
But even in C++ you can't redefine what + means for types, where it already has a builtin meaning. The only thing you can do is define what it does for custom types. That means when you see the + operator applied to some class or struct type, you should already be aware that this is nothing built-in and equivalent to a function call. If you are not, you are just not fluent in your tooling. That is completely different problem. It is something learnable, not a fundamental problem of the tooling.