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Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 10:13:40 +0200
From: Jean-Marc Alliot <alliot@recherche.enac.fr>
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CC: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: Overloading again (Was Re: [Caml-list] Interfacing C++ and Ocaml)
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Brian Rogoff wrote:

> I'd also love to know if and when this will make it into Ocaml since this
> is one of the few things that I dislike about ML style languages and
> even after quite a bit of Caml programming I still miss overloading.
>

Well, I am going to be the black sheep again, but as an old ADA and C++ programmer,
I don't really want to see overloading pop up in ML.

Overloading can become easily a source of mistakes. My favorite example is the
following. A few years ago, I was managing a project with C++ code, and one of the
programmer was using a third party library (the author of this library was gone and
had been replaced). And he had a bug inside the following code fragment in that
library:

toto(titi *initp)
{
titi *p;

for (p=initp;p!=NULL;p++)
   {
     .......
   }

}

And it took him a very long time to realize that the ++ operator had been
overloaded, somewhere in a .h file included in an other .h file, and that instead
of incrmenting the pointer, it was doing something like p=p->next, with a next
field incorrectly initialized somewhere.

Having different names for different functions is, according to me, an excellent
thing.

JMA


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