So, why does D overload ~ and ~= for string concatentation?
The obvious choices are + and +=.  If there's a complaint about a conflict with
pointer arithmetic, well, pointer arithmetic is horrifying anyway, and should be
used a lot less often in normal programming than string concatentation.  Since D
understands arrays, you don't need to use pointer arithmetic to work around the
C messiness of treating all strings as char pointers.  Since D has strong
typing, it should know the difference between a char array (concat-able) and a
char pointer anyway.

"Nathanael Nerode" <Nathanael_member@pathlink.com> wrote in message news:aap078$vlg$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> So, why does D overload ~ and ~= for string concatentation?
> The obvious choices are + and +=.  If there's a complaint about a conflict
with
> pointer arithmetic, well, pointer arithmetic is horrifying anyway, and
should be
> used a lot less often in normal programming than string concatentation.
Since D
> understands arrays, you don't need to use pointer arithmetic to work
around the
> C messiness of treating all strings as char pointers.  Since D has strong typing, it should know the difference between a char array (concat-able)
and a
> char pointer anyway.

However, just like in C, name of array is a pointer to its contents. So, if foo is a char[], both would be legal:

    foo + "666"
    foo + 666

With ~, there is no such ambiguity. It is clear, where the concatenation
happens,
and where it is the addition or a shift.