> operator overloading caused more problems than they solved
[citation needed]
Just because operator overloading can be abused doesn't mean that it isn't a massive boon in certain problem spaces (e.g. math libraries, SIMD libraries, etc.)
[citation needed]
Just because operator overloading can be abused doesn't mean that it isn't a massive boon in certain problem spaces (e.g. math libraries, SIMD libraries, etc.)
1. translating format strings to other languages is extremely difficult because the position of expressions in the message is fixed.
2. modifying how things are printed requires modifying global state, and it's easy to forget to reset the flags on std::cout after setting the precision of floats or something.
There's also the famous question of "what does the multiplication operator do on vectors?" problem, but that's something that could be solved by simply having a standard "vector" interface that defines it in a particular way. Overall I don't fully disagree, but seeing as it happened once with C++, I can imagine it can happen again in some equally widespread language (Javascript with it's + operator on strings maybe?).
This only applies to std:: cout and std::cerr. Other stream interfaces, like std::fstream or std::stringstream don't have this problem. Also, it is orthogonal to operator overloading.