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From: molbio@monet.Berkeley.EDU (Mr. Molbio)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Complex type / C++
Message-ID: <18829@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Mon, 11-May-87 00:42:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.18829
Posted: Mon May 11 00:42:57 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 13-May-87 00:38:17 EDT
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: thomas@xcssun.UUCP (Vincent thomas)
Lines: 21
Keywords: operator overload

Summary:

References:

Disorganization: U.C. Berkeley


>data type.  There is a problem, though, with trying to borrow the
>real-number arithmetic operations for use with other types of
>"number".  For example, I am at a loss as to what U*V should mean
>for U,V vectors.  Is that an outer product? wedge product? inner
>product? what metric?  (Certainly the componentwise product of the
>holors is not what is wanted.)  Multiplication of fancy numbers (e.g.
>matrices) tends not to be commutative.  What symbol do we use for the
>very important transposition operator?  How about inverses (division
>is often not a useful concept for fancy numbers)..

Good point.  It makes sense not to try and overload "*",
which is always commutative in C (and may be rearranged by the
compiler) with a non-commutative operator.

How do languages like C++ and Ada deal with this?
Do they require the definition of some minimal set of operators?

Is there a K&R of C++?  I would like to learn more about C++
but don't know how to go about doing this.

        ..!ucbvax!xcssun!thomas