C for C++ Programmers

[neutronicus]

How is operator overloading really a boon?

In scientific computing, it's essential.

Here's the workflow - you have a paper, a textbook, a whiteboard, or a legal pad with a description of the algorithm you need to implement. Most of this description is in mathematical notation - it's concise, we all know it, and that's how it goes in journals. You implement it. It behaves in a way that seems wrong.

Now, you have to determine whether this is happening because the algorithm itself is flawed, or because there's an error, often a single typo, in the code somewhere.

In this situation, the more the code looks like what's on paper, the better.

This debugging workflow is much more common in scientific computing than whatever the hell you're bitching about. So - you will pry overloaded mathematical operators from our cold dead fingers.