So I ended up abusing some operators by overloading them for things that were not really arithmetic. I made them private and the definition and only uses of these operators were in a space of 15 lines of code, so the abuse was very local…
Ideally, I would use infix operators rather than misusing the arithmetic operators. However, the arithmetic operations have a huge advantage over infix operators in that they can be used to do compound assignment. So instead of saying something like
someLongName = someLongName + aValue
I can of course say
someLongName += aValue
Which you cannot do with infix functions, but the thought occurred to me, why not? Why doesn’t the language let you create compound assignment with infix functions? If I had an infix function called foo, why couldn’t the language let me replace:
someLongName = someLongName foo aValue
with
someLongName foo= aValue
in the same way that it builds += from a plus method, why not foo= from a foo method?
(If you are curious I used += to append and %= to prepend for composing functions)
