From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:48:44 GMT
Subject: Re: How do get a specific version of a particular file?
Message-ID: <alpine.LRH.0.82.0702272040050.29426@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0702271719300.12485@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > 
> > /me wonders why Linux wasn't written in C++ with overloaded operators...
> 
> Actually, there was a short while that we tried it.

I know.  Amusing piece of history.

> Overloading of operators wouldn't be very useful, though: it really only 
> pays in either real math (where having "+" etc do the right thing for 
> complex numbers/vectors/matrices/whatever is totally unambiguous and just 
> makes code a lot more readable) or with really trivial stuff (ie "+" for 
> string concatenation).

Well...   We could have >> and << to replace memcpy(), copy_to_user(), 
copy_from_user(), and select the appropriate method depending on whether 
one is a user space pointer.

Or spin_lock++ and spin_lock--.

Or written_data >> file >> filesystem, replacing all fops methods with 
operators as well.

;-)

> Outside of math and really trivial stuff, it's just a horribly bad idea, 
> because it just makes for subtle and hard to understand code.

Indeed.  Well it can make the intent of the code clearer but certainly 
not its implementation.


Nicolas