Re: Ada self-referential operators

[rogoff@sccm.Stanford.EDU (Brian Rogoff)]

John G. Volan writes:
    I never cease to be amazed (and disgusted) at how enamored some people
    in this industry seem to be about using arbitrary sequences of special
    characters for just about everything under the sun.  Who says it's
    *desirable* to load up a language with a lot of cryptic
    "mathematicalese"?  Doesn't anyone remember how *hard* it was to learn
    math, way back in grade school?

In some problem domains it is very useful to have concise operators. 
MATLAB, for example, even makes up new "YAFOs" to represent common 
matrix manipulations. While I agree that overuse of special operators 
could lead to highly unreadable code, tasteful use of such operators 
makes reading math, and by extension, mathematical code, easier (IMO). 
People could also choose bad names for functions and variables and make 
code unreadable that way, yet I've never heard it suggested that we should 
program in the untyped lambda calculus!

    IMHO, the operators that Ada currently supplies ought to be considered
    a grudging concession to the algebraic indoctrination we all suffered
    as children.  The only reason they are there at all is because they've
    been beaten into our heads for so long that it is impossible to escape
    them.  The last thing they should be viewed as is as a precedent for
    yet more operators.

Eiffel 3 allows one to make up new "binary operator" names, although 
without true function overloading this is probably not too complicated. 
Any Eiffelists feel that this is bad/good? Also, I am pretty sure that 
Axiom, and probably other computer math systems, aloow one to define 
new operators. Maybe it's just something that math folks like?

-- Brian