Re: Flexible Strings (was Equality operator...)

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Wes said

<<I agree with you that automatic conversion is generally harmful.  And that
too much explicit conversion is information hiding of the wrong sort, i.e.,
hiding the abstraction in implementation clutter.  The thing with "+" is
more an issue of retraining one's instincts--after more than 35 years, it's
hard not to think of it as something associated with quantities.  But then,
the strangeness of it is a point in its favor because it catches the
attention.  If it were routine, being only a single character, it could
easily be overlooked.>>

Jean Ichbiah argued strongly during the Ada 95 design for introducing one
additional unary operator that would have no predefined meaning, to be used
for these kind of conversion operations.

I supported that, and suggested the possibility of using the international
currency conversion symbol for this purpose (it is sometimes called pillow).

However, we seemed to be alone, and others did not like the idea, so
must not be a good idea after all :-)