🚀 go-pugleaf

Here comes another (more or less necessary) view...

I think that overloading operators may be nice but not necessary. In my
opinion, there is a much simpler solution with pretty much the same
effect.

How about an extension to the language which would allow functions to
return not only predefined types such as integers, reals and so on but
also records and arrays?  What I'm thinking of could look like this:

TYPE COMPLEX= RECORD RE,IM:REAL END;
PROCEDURE ADDC(A,B:COMPLEX):COMPLEX;
BEGIN
   B.RE:=B.RE+A.RE;
   B.IM:=B.IM+A.IM;
   RETURN B;
END ADDC;

This would result in expressions like
D:=ADDC(MULTC(B,A),DIVC(C,A));
which is, in effect, Polish notation. It would take a little bit of
getting used to to read, but it is better than nothing; it also wouldn't
need a drastic alteration of the language. In fact, the proposed
standard for ANSI-C has required this kind of thing for records (or
structures, as they are called in C).

Thomas  Koenig                   UI0T@DKAUNI2.BITNET
                                 UI0T%DKAUNI2.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
                         (soon)  UI0T@IBM3090.RZ.UNI-KARLSRUHE.DE