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.”

Why doesn't Elixir support standard operator overloading?

Questions & Help Questions

billylanchantin October 21, 2023, 4:25pm 20

For anyone thinking about this, the JS library luxon has a really great write-up about calendar-math vs. time-math: