• Nathanael Nerode (8/8) May 01 2002 So, why does D overload ~ and ~= for string concatentation?
• Pavel Minayev (14/22) May 01 2002 with

Nathanael Nerode <Nathanael_member pathlink.com> writes:

So, why does D overload ~ and ~= for string concatentation?
The obvious choices are + and +=.  If there's a complaint about a conflict with
pointer arithmetic, well, pointer arithmetic is horrifying anyway, and should be
used a lot less often in normal programming than string concatentation.  Since D
understands arrays, you don't need to use pointer arithmetic to work around the
C messiness of treating all strings as char pointers.  Since D has strong
typing, it should know the difference between a char array (concat-able) and a
char pointer anyway.

"Pavel Minayev" <evilone omen.ru> writes:

"Nathanael Nerode" <Nathanael_member pathlink.com> wrote in message
news:aap078$vlg$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 So, why does D overload ~ and ~= for string concatentation?
 The obvious choices are + and +=.  If there's a complaint about a conflict

with
 pointer arithmetic, well, pointer arithmetic is horrifying anyway, and

should be
 used a lot less often in normal programming than string concatentation.

Since D
 understands arrays, you don't need to use pointer arithmetic to work

around the
 C messiness of treating all strings as char pointers.  Since D has strong
 typing, it should know the difference between a char array (concat-able)

and a
 char pointer anyway.

However, just like in C, name of array is a pointer to its contents. So,
if foo is a char[], both would be legal:

    foo + "666"
    foo + 666

With ~, there is no such ambiguity. It is clear, where the concatenation
happens,
and where it is the addition or a shift.