this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Rust
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Mindblowing features are basically, by definition, a result of bad language design. They blow your mind, since they are totally unexpected behaviours. They may still be cool, but they are unexpected and hence unintuitive.
A language that are full of these is Perl. And one simple one is that you can take the string "AAAAA" and use addition on that, like "AAAAA"++ and you will get the result "AAAAB". Cool you may think, but is it really? Addition is normally used to increase the value of a number, that is a completely different operation than modifying a String. The string "AAAAA" cannot be said to be greater or less than "AAAAB", besides the very special case when we order it. But in general the name "John" is not considered to be higher/lower than "Mark", they are just different. So, even if it is cool to manipulate strings by using addition/subtraction, it is still bad language design and very unintuitive. Also, since perl is so loosely typed, it may also cause very unexpected bugs.
The general theme of your comment is good, but the example is...
strcmp()
docs:So basically, if C had higher level constructs, it would be identical to Rust here.
Rust has
impl Add<&str> for String
andimpl AddAssign<&str> for String
. Both append as expected.But maybe you meant numeric addition specifically.
In that case, yes, Rust doesn't have that, although it's an
impl<'a> Step for &'a str
away from having something similar (it would be("AAAAA"..).next()
).impl Step for char
already exists of course, but shouldn't if we take your argument to its logical conclusion.Oh, and C would most definitely have this feature if it could. Numerical manipulation of
char
s is commonplace there.I hate it to break it to you but it's the same with numbers.
Ok, I then have some business proposals....