Re: We have a new standard!

On Thu, 2 Jan 2025 13:51:53 +0100
David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> wibbled:

On 02/01/2025 10:23, Muttley@dastardlyhq.com wrote:

Now maybe, but when the language was new I don't see the problem in
creating new
operators specifically for I/O. After all, he had to create new keywords so
why not operators?

>
C++ added "::", ".*" and "->*" early on, and C++20 added <=>.  (There
are also some new non-punctuation operators - like "new".)  Adding new
operators is certainly something that was done, but not done lightly.

When the language is first created thats irrelevant. You add what you need
to add. Overloading << and >> was unnecessary and confusing.

cout << 0xFF << 2 << 1234;

>
That doesn't require brackets (unless you are a fan of smart-arse
obfuscated code, and really wanted "cout << (0xff << 2) << 1234;").

So adding brackets to differential shift from stream I/O is obfuscating is it?

cout <= OxFF << 2 <= 1234;
 
is a lot clearer and doesn't.

>
It is not a lot clearer - it is no clearer at all.  If someone wrote

Its far clearer and you're just arguing for the sake of it. Extending your
logic why not just have one operator that does everything which varies with
context?

that (in a parallel universe where <= was used for output streams), I'd
ask two questions.  First, is it a typo and the programmer meant to use
"<=" instead of "<<" ?  Secondly, I'd wonder what the *beep* the
programmer had intended at all, typo or not.

Now you're trolling.

According to "The Design and Evolution of C++", Unix redirection
operators were a major inspiration for the choice of << and >>.

Perhaps they shouldn't have been. Perl munged shell and C style syntax and
look what a mess that turned out to be.

Why would it?
 

>
It would be a significant change to the syntax and grammar of the
language, complicating parsing, analysis and compilation.  And they

Huh? How would it make parsing MORE complicated? Have you ever written a
parser?

being very subjective.  You have said before (and not without reason)
that C++ can be hard to learn.  A plethora of new operators would not help.

Having specific operators for specific tasks would actually make it easier
to learn and read in the same way having specific keywords for specific
tasks does. C++ problems due to arn't too many operators.

Presumably this is what the new print() and println() functions will do
except they seem to be using python style formatters for [reasons].
 

>
A key point is that the format string should never have to have
information about the type of the operands - thus it is type-safe

It wouldn't need to. A particular formatter could just call some default
object output method just like streams do.

Could this all have been done from the start of C++?  In theory, yes -

Thats when I'm refering to.

in practice no.  std::format and std::print rely on various modern C++
features, such as compile-time evaluation of functions, and are

Umm, you do realise most compilers already do compile time analysis of
printf formatters otherwise they wouldn't be able to give warnings about
invalid types being passed.