I’m working on a project right now that makes heavy, heavy use of Decimal. I just hit bug today where >= was used instead of Decimal.compare/2 and it’s not the first time I’ve seen this happen. Additionally, Decimal has some nice convenience methods (as Java-esque as they are) such as eq?/2 and gt?…

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of why Elixir has made the choices it has, I suggest the following elixir-lang-core discussions: https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/eE_mMWKdVYY (2016) https://groups.google.com/g/elixir-lang-core/c/W2TeQm5r1H4 (2022) It’s a lot of back and forth,…

You could do something like this: defmodule MyDecimal do defmacro __using__(_) do quote do import Kernel, except: [+: 2, -: 2, ...] def left + right do Decimal.add(left, right) end def left - right do Decimal.sub(left, right) end # ... …

I think the reason is not to make unreadable code, the example you provided shows clearly how someone can get lost when he will want to use + with non decimal values. In this case matching or a guard would be a better solution if that is possible, I didn’t work with operators before in elixir so I …

That’s an interesting example. You could contextually overload (almost like a Ruby refinement) in the current module. With that said, I can see the argument for arithmetic operators. I almost wish I hadn’t included it because what was lost was not that potential convenience. The pain point isn’t r…

Awesome. A buddy of mine actually just pointed me to this commit . It is indeed a conscious decision related to readability: Note the Elixir community generally discourages custom operators. They can be hard to read and even more to understand, as they don’t have a descriptive name like functions …

You could replace == operator with a custom one that would make the necessary checks, at compile-time/runtime overhead if that is critical for business.

CompareChain might help with some of your use cases (shameless plug: I’m the author). I had similar headaches working with DateTime structs. It’s easier to read code like: left <= right vs DateTime.compare(left, right) != :gt. CompareChain is a sort of middle ground where you can write this: imp…

I’ll take a look! All things date and time also fall under this same pain point.

Sorry I’m a bit lost in your wording re: unreadable code but I’m talking more how many languages overload + to work with several data types, like: 1 + 1, "Hello" + "!", and [1, 2, 3] + [4] whereas Elixir has its own operators. But of course: [image] binarypaladin: The real problem comes with e…

This is a really nice middle ground. I like it.

I come from a Ruby background so… I use and abuse overloading, lol. I’m okay with a decision one way or another. At least it isn’t Java’s “you can’t overload but we selectively have one overload exception for concatenating strings.”

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Why doesn't Elixir support standard operator overloading?

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sodapopcan October 20, 2023, 9:30pm 14

Oh nice! Once again, thanks!