From: clines@delete_this.airmail.net (Kevin Cline)
Subject: Re: Why one school changed from Pascal to C++
Date: 1997/05/03
Date: 1997-05-03T00:00:00+00:00 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <8229B62E52EAC144.6C6C6DF4FB6915C3.A10EAF24E2BF24E1@library-proxy.airnews.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 5kd7eo$2b4@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk
rrw1000@cus.cam.ac.uk (Richard Watts) wrote:
> It's interesting that they seem to rate things like initialisation
>and overloading as plusses for ADT implementation: experience seems to
>indicate that full transparency is often a bad idea (do you _really_
>want to give the impression that matrix multiplication is
>commutative ?).
Why should the use of '*' imply commutativity? Surely almost all programmers
working on code that does multiply matrices will know that matrix
multiplication is not commutative. If they don't, that is a training problem,
not an argument against operator overloading. It's no more obvious that
the order of arguments to matrix_multiply is important.
Symbols are used in mathematics because they are easier to read than text.
They are used in computer programs for the same reason.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~1997-05-03 0:00 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
[not found] <33664F10.6B76@mathernet.com>
1997-05-02 0:00 ` Why one school changed from Pascal to C++ Philippe Allenbach
1997-05-02 0:00 ` Richard Watts
1997-05-03 0:00 ` Kevin Cline [this message]
1997-05-02 0:00 ` Farshad Nayeri
1997-05-05 0:00 ` Rennie Allen
1997-05-05 0:00 ` Farshad Nayeri
1997-05-06 0:00 ` Richard Watts
1997-05-06 0:00 ` Farshad Nayeri
1997-05-06 0:00 ` Robert Dewar
1997-05-06 0:00 ` Spencer Allain
1997-05-13 0:00 ` W. Wesley Groleau (Wes)
1997-05-15 0:00 ` Kaz Kylheku
1997-05-02 0:00 ` Lance Kibblewhite
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