October 6th, 2007
Operator Overloading in Ruby
I really like the fact that Ruby has operator overloading. In many cases this feature is not very fitting in a language, but in Ruby it definitely has its place. So what’s the difference? Why do people generally say that operator overloading in C++ is a bad thing, and that Java shouldn’t have it? I believe the main reason is static typing. When you have static typing and combine that with a verbose language, operator overloading doesn’t really fit in. You can’t create DSL looking API’s out of the language since the line noise usually make such efforts futile. And then you’re left with only the bad parts of operator overloading.
In Ruby on the other hand, it fits very well. It actually makes sense to be able to redefine and add operators since there are many places where your code can be made much more readable with it. Of course, you always have to be careful and not go over board with it, but when used riht it improves readability to a large degree. A typical example of nice use of overloading is in Hpricot:
doc/:html/:body/:p/:img
Here the division operator have been overloaded to make it possible for you to write XPath like search strings beginning on a parsed Hpricot document.
Another place I really like is in the Ruby core library where the call method is usually overloaded as []. This makes sense if you think about it – in most cases the objects you can call on will take parameters and return a result based on the parameter. This can be mapped quite neatly to an Array or Hash containing values that are returned, and in fact you can imagine swapping out this restricted usage of an Array or Hash to something that you can call things on.
If the [] method is all you used for access, duck typing makes it easy to send in a Proc instead of an Array or Hash.
Another reason using [] can be nice, is since Ruby doesn’t let you override (). If you want to emulate that kind of behavior, [] can act exactly the same if you want it to.
In the Ruby core, the more useful things that implement [] is Array and Hash, of course, UnboundMethod, BoundMethod, Proc and Continuation. This means that you can do something like proc{ puts “hello” }[] if you feel like it.
There are lots of other nice operators to overload in Ruby, though. Some of the better ones are unary + and unary -, all the common arithmetic operators, ||, &&, |, &, <, >, <=, >=, ~, =~, **, ==, === and a few others. The two things missing here is the ! and friends, and (). But of course, adding () wouldn’t really work with the Ruby language. ! on the other hand should be overridable.
So, you should use operator overloading in Ruby, but be careful that it makes sense and actually gives you a good abstraction, not just something “cool”.
