[bruce343434]

Operator overloading isn't to blame.

If I overload shift-left `<<` for a completely different concept such as "piping", that's my mistake. That's like writing a normal function or method and calling it `foo()` when it has nothing to do with the concept of fooing.

That said, unless you are writing a math library or some container, there's not many good uses for operator overloading.

[pjc50]

> If I overload shift-left `<<` for a completely different concept such as "piping", that's my mistake.

Yours and C++'s.

[frogulis]

I think the main difference between the two is, as someone reading and debugging the code, will probably eventually check even those methods that I assume I know roughly what they do. In contrast, I may not even think to check an overloaded operator unless I _already know_ that it's overloaded.

Maybe a good analogous method would be an overloaded `.ToString()` in C# that has side effects or returns the full text of the Magna Carta or something.

[bunderbunder]

Custom operators of any kind are definitely a problem for learners. I think people just fixate on overloading because that's the only kind of operator customization available in the most popular languages.

The particular problem is that search engines tend to have terrible support for searching for arbitrary sequences of non-alphabetic characters.