>Why does '+' (and friends) get this special form, but not my functions?
Your functions can get that (and other) special form. You need to use a language where you can define your own operators. Have you looked at C++, C#, Haskell, or LISP?
Your functions can get that (and other) special form. You need to use a language where you can define your own operators. Have you looked at C++, C#, Haskell, or LISP?
Or, um, Swift. :)
Which is where much of the Swift "language" is defined... in the standard library.
-Chris
AFAIK, Lisp doesn't have syntactically-distinct operators at all just functions which may have names similar to operators used in other languages, and C# and C++ don't seem to support custom operators at all. [0]
OTOH, Perl 6 has robust support for custom operators.
[0] except that C++ has apparently been hacked to create custom operators with some limitations via macros [1]
[1] http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31783/Custom-User-Define...