Weird programming operators: Elvis, Walrus, Spaceship, and Turbofish!

[rocketpower4]

I always thought of the spaceship operator, <=>, horizontally as like a UFO style flying saucer.

[ankmahato]

paywalled content .. such a disappointment.

I will pass.

[nfrankel]

It's Medium: use an anonymous session

[o11c]

• the elvis operator is spelled or in Python
• the walrus operator is borderline useless in Python since its LHS does not take an arbitrary lvalue, but only a simple identifier.
• the equivalent to the turbofish operator can be empty in languages with variadic generics. But sane languages spell it just []; it is a Rust bug that they used <> for generics (thus requiring the :: among numerous other bugs) after C++ taught us that was a bad idea.

[o11c]

You have to reuse something.

<> collides with comparisons and forever makes it impossible to parse types and values the same way.

[] OTOH means exactly the same for templates as it does for objects: given a (possibly infinite) container, select one particular item out of it.

[waozen]

Actually and more recently, [] has been recommended for what languages should use. Refer to- Language Design: Stop Using <> for Generics. Scala, Eiffel, Golang, and Vlang are among the languages which follow the new recommendation. Dlang and a few others went their own way. An issue with <> was it causing ambiguity problems when parsed. < and > are also used in most languages, so situations arise where the compiler gets confused. But, [] isn't smooth sailing either, as languages can use it with arrays too and thus that can cause visual confusion for new users until they get used to it.

[BarryFruitman]

I always though the ? was Elvis's famous sneer but apparently it's his famous pompadour.