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Comment by blackpill0w | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood why people complain a lot about `std::cout << "string"`, if the problem is that this operator is used for bit shifting, simply stop thinking that way (genius I know), do you think of addition when you see `string + "concatenate"`? Operator overloading is awesome, and like everything in programming, if used correctly; constructing paths with / is sweet, and I find << with streams visually appealing and expressive, it's feeding data to the stdout/file/etc, same for `std::cin >> var`, data goes from the stdin to the variable.

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> do you think of addition when you see `string + "concatenate"`

Yes. And it tortures me every time.

I religiously avoid string concatenation in Python for this very reason. It's not that "+" necessarily means addition; it's that it always means a commutative operation (to somebody who has learned some algebra). String concatenation is notoriously non-commutative, thus it is extremely disturbing to write it using a visibly commutative operator. Any other operator except "+" would be better. For example, a space, or a product, or a hyphen. Whatever. But please, not a commutative operator. It breaks my brain parser.

This is a really good point. It bothers me too, but I hadn't really articulated why.

It's also one of the biggest sources of bugs when dealing with loose types around strings and numbers.

When it comes to languages that let you mix strings and numbers, Lua has it right. + always adds, and accepts numbers and strings that can cleanly convert to numbers. .. always concatenates, and accepts numbers and strings.

Aside from the syntax (I find it ugly, you find it visually appealing - it's subjective), iostreams are inefficient, awkward to customise, not thread safe (allows interleaving), and mix format and data (that one is also subjective).

I love me some operator overloading. I love / for filesystem separators, I love | for piping things. I don't like << and >> so much but that's just because of too many years of writing them everywhere.

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