Re: 7.0 wishlist?

Joshua Cranmer wrote:
Harold Yarmouth wrote:
Just as they make unchecked casts of generic collections at their own risk right now, and prefer to avoid doing so whenever possible.

The primary purpose of unchecked conversions is to facilitate migration to generics at disparate times.

No, unchecked conversions have other, commonplace uses. Frameworks/reflection, for starters, and there are other cases where they can't always be avoided because the compiler sometimes just isn't smart enough to prove everything the programmer can about what types can actually be occurring where.

I feel that your response is inadequate.

I frankly don't give a ***, and furthermore, I am getting rather fed up with your unpleasant attitude toward me. Shape up or stop posting replies to my posts.

My response was not inadequate. It's possible that your comprehension of it was. In fact, given the way you are behaving, at this point I'd say it's even likely.

My guess is that you're dead-set against operator overloading, probably at least partly for emotional reasons, and that is why you refuse to actually seriously read and consider proposals for them, and furthermore why you respond with mild but noticeable rudeness whenever the subject comes up here.

My suggestion, if your opinion is set in stone and not subject to further debate, is that you simply ignore other peoples' discussions of operator overloading and allow them to have such discussions in peace.

See <http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/browse_frm/thread/444250a94b1020c6/d1a9b67ddd23f8f9?#d1a9b67ddd23f8f9> for the start of a thread in which I discussed this particular issue at length

Sorry, but if you want to explain your reasoning, you'll have to actually explain your reasoning, not fob me off with some URL that's so long it won't work (with this news software at least) anyway.

Pointing someone to a canned response is not a discussion, and the purpose of this newsgroup (like most newsgroups) is discussion, not shooting down everything anyone says with prefabricated, non-negotiable responses.

Other postings on that thread reveal my opinions on operator
overloading more clearly.

Oh, this thread has sufficed to make your opinion of operator overloading more-than-adequately clear.

The problem here is that you apparently feel the need to try to shut down discussion and impose your opinion on everyone else, by punishing anyone who tries to discuss operator overloading in an open-minded way. Said punishment accomplished by being nasty to whoever dared to do so and by insulting that person in public. Anyone that stands up for himself and calls you on doing so, of course, gets another dose for his efforts.

Fortunately for free speech and democracy, you've just stumbled across someone who will continue to stand up to your bullying and will not knuckle under to such a childish and anemic form of intimidation. (And you'd find I'd still not knuckle under to considerably worse forms of intimidation, if you had as much ability to use force against me as I suspect you wish you did.)

The appropriate behavior in response to finding speech you don't like on the Internet is to ignore it, not flame whoever wrote it. Usually applied to pornography and politics, but equally applicable to operator overloading.

* You cannot assume that any operation is commutative. Even for stuff like multiplication (matrix multiplication is, in fact, non-commutative), the LHS could be causing a mutation and therefore need to be evaluated before the RHS.

The contract for .plus should include commutativity. That leaves .times. There, one could specify that if times is noncommutative there be a ..leftHandedTimes (or whatever name seems most suitable) that reverses the roles of LHS and RHS.

* "Inverting" operations is often perilous. Dividing by a matrix is conceptually equivalent to multiplying by its (pseudo)inverse, but inversion is one of the worst things one can do where solving a matrix equation is preferred.

So is using floats for currency.

It is not the job of the language designer to enforce against every conceivable misuse of a language feature, least of all to do so by simply refusing to add any features at all for fear that they might otherwise be abused.

I can easily picture misuse of / for matrices, but I can easily picture intelligent use, too. For example, instead of actually inverting the matrix, .invert or .dividedBy or similarly can generate an object that symbolically represents the operation applied to the curried arguments, and only when some method is invoked to try to extract an ordinary number of some sort out of a chain of computations does the object representing that chain and its bound arguments begin to perform actual numeric calculations, which it may then do using whatever strategy seems appropriate -- perhaps even employing the Strategy Pattern under the hood to do so. It might, for example, end up performing row reduction of the matrix together with some other stuff using a numerically-stable algorithm when used one way, and simply invert the matrix when all you have is "System.out.println(m.invert());". (In this case, the inverted-matrix object's toString method would calculate the inverse and print the results. Probably by row-reducing the matrix adjoined to an identity matrix, in the textbook-recommended fashion.)

I'm sorry. I assumed you had been a denizen of this newsgroup for a while

A quick Google Groups search should have disabused you of that notion.

The main thread on which I discussed this

is not relevant to the present discussion. As I have already indicated, I am not here to argue with canned replies. I am here to have civil and intelligent discussions with educated adult human beings.

It follows that if you are not interested in doing so then you are not interested in me, and I therefore recommend that you ignore (or even killfile) me rather than continue this.

If languages were not allowed (by who? nobody has this authority
anyway) to be too different from one another, we'd probably all
be sitting here discussing Java 7's implementation of cons, car,
and cdr for Chrissake.

The authority is by the people in charge of the languages--in Java's case, the JSR expert groups.

The problem here is that you seem to be behaving as if you are arrogating that authority for your own personal use. Even if you actually sit on one of those expert groups, you are one voice among many, and therefore pretending to be somehow "in charge of Java" is deceptive as well as rude.

No language exists in a vacuum; note that Java's generics feature
is roughly based on C++'s templates, at least in terms of syntax.

But this was not mandatory. It could have been done differently; it just didn't turn out to be.

(In this case, there don't seem to be all that many alternatives anyway, other than to change the delimiters to other than < and >. Also, arguably the use of a very C++-like syntax was a *bad* move because the semantics are quite different owing to type erasure.)

LISP is not close to Java

My point was that it was one of the first successful high-level languages, so if your "rule" that languages can't deviate too much from what else is popular at the time had any actual force, we wouldn't even be sitting here having this discussion about operator overloading -- you'd have just shot down my suggestion to allow infix notation for common arithmetic operators instead. :-)

~= perhaps, for equals()?

o_O ... that makes no sense

To you, perhaps.

But it is awkward and verbose.

To make it less verbose than my example requires several orthogonal steps:
1. A constructor that takes an array of pair objects.

Easily done.

2. A "neat" way to create pair objects.

Pair literals could be added, surely.

3. Reduced verbosity in array creation expressions.

Also quite possible.

If either of the last two does not happen, the creation will end up being more verbose.

So, some things should happen before other things. This is the substance of your argument that none of them should happen at all?

Usually that would be apparent from context. Quite often, the very preceding line will have resembled "x = foo.get("string");".

In my experience with languages such as C and C++

Your experience with "languages such as C and C++" is not relevant. We are discussing Java. Your experience with Java is thus the only thing along those lines that would be relevant.

"... our reactions to basic proposals before repeating the proposal without adding anything new to say."

So your objection is now that I was *unoriginal* in some way?

No idea exists in a vacuum. You'd be hard pressed to find any idea that was 100% "original" in this or any other newsgroup, or anywhere else for that matter.

If you have nothing new to say (as evidenced by your repeatedly pointing me to some URL with some canned pre-written response you have for all proposals of operator overloading in Java), and you don't think I have anything original to say either, then why are you saying anything at all? Why not just ignore this thread entirely? Why choose to join it and then complain that it's "not original enough" for your liking? Why go so far as to actually denigrate the thread's OP for being "unoriginal"? It can't possibly serve any constructive, Java-discussing purpose for you to do so, after all.

Why not just step out of the way and let other people discuss any Java-related topic they please, by just staying out of those topics that you find tiresome, repetitive, or otherwise uninteresting or annoying, and especially those to which you don't have anything novel to add?

Why tear someone down for making an effort to be helpful?

Especially, why blast them IN PUBLIC for doing so?

Is making a good-faith effort to be helpful such a serious crime?

And once more with emphasis, if you do not like discussions of closures you're free not to read them. Launching a rant sprinkled with personal attacks against someone for mentioning them in your presence is not appropriate, adult behavior.

It's not that I don't like them, it's just that no one bothers to add anything new, so it's the same bloody stuff being repeated once every month or so.

If that's your opinion, then you should just ignore the subject whenever it comes up. Attacking everyone who wants to participate in such discussions, simply for doing so, is inappropriate behavior and even, I'd argue, an affront to the concept of free speech.

I didn't look to "gauge your reactions" because I shouldn't have to. I should be able to expect civility so long as I have been civil myself, and so long as what I write here is on topic here, even if you disagree with my opinion.

I would expect that someone should avoid repeating points belabored to death before posting something.

I would expect that someone should respect the right of the people to peacably assemble and discuss Java programming here. If some people here wish to have a civil, level-headed discussion of operator overloading, I see nothing in the newsgroup charter to forbid it, or to justify your hostility towards them for doing so.

Though I notice something else interesting -- you seem to be focusing that hostility upon me, rather than distributing it evenly among all those who have participated in this thread in a less "my mind is made up, operator overloading sucks" fashion. Perhaps because I'm the OP of the thread in which the subject came up?

No matter. It is inappropriate behavior for an adult to complain about the topic of a non-off-topic post to an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup, and inappropriate behavior for an adult to be personally rude and denigrating towards another person without just cause. I had been inoffensive and civil when you first publicly impugned my intelligence and/or competence, and I consider your doing so therefore to have been uncalled-for.

It doesn't take much effort to determine if what you are about to
add is something that has been recently discussed

Why should I? It's not off-topic for this newsgroup, so if I want to discuss it, that's well within my rights. And if you *don't* want to discuss it, ignoring me is well within yours. If, as you seem to be trying to imply, *nobody* wants to discuss it, they can *all* ignore me. That they haven't, and that some have been interested rather than hostile, suggests to me that it is *not* true that *nobody* wants to discuss it, and your apparent efforts to derail a discussion among consenting adults is thus especially offensive to anyone who values freedom of speech and democracy.

If you don't like people discussing operator overloading here, killfile the phrase, or the threads where it comes up. If you think there should be a Java programming forum that doesn't have operator overloading discussions, go start one. PHPBB is free and open source and hosting is cheap these days, or you could promote the creation of comp.lang.java.programming.no.operator.overloading.discussions.please.moderated (or simply go ahead and create alt.lang.java.programming.no.operator.overloading.discussions.please.moderated).

Perhaps, though, you like to unthinkingly and uncritically bash operator overloading and anyone who you suspect may not be dead-set against it, and would much rather do that than simply ignore the entire topic.

In that case, I'd suggest instead alt.java.operator.overloading.sucks.sucks.sucks as an appropriate group to create to suit your fancy while leaving those of us who like to discuss operator overloading in Java civilly to do so here in peace.
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