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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Don’t even need operator overloading for vectors/matrices. It would be fine if we could simply define new operators (functions with infix notation) and use those. This would allow us to define an operator for matrix multiplication, matrix-vector product, dot product, and cross product.

Having to define these operators as functions with unique text names is extremely ugly and serves no purpose that I can see.

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What was the language which used backticks to transform any function into an infix binary operator? Ruby? Perl?

Something like this could actually fulfill Andrews goal of not having any hidden control flow, as the function would be plainly visible.

The other thing of course would be, what then the valid function names would be? Definitely not `*` but probably `×` or whatever.

> What was the language which used backticks to transform any function into an infix binary operator? Ruby? Perl?

Haskell.

Haskell does this.

Racket

I think the change could be as limited as a change to the parser. You could also enforce hygenicity (limiting scope only to places where it is asked for) by requiring it to be

    const @"..." = @import("my_operator.zig").add;

For example. Then in the code the parser transforms

    (a ... b)

    @"..."(a, b)

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