> Then why did you even reply to my message?

You said you'd never seen a good argument against it, I merely wanted to tell
you the argument against it that I've heard, since it was good enough to
convince the programmers I know. I never meant the argument was against operator
overloading being used by anyone, just against it being used in the environments
I've worked in. It was really only inteded as trivia, I never meant to spark
such a long discussion! :)

Though I confess at the time I heard the argument I knew far too little about OO
code, so I've failed miserably to convey the true convincingness of the original
discussion...

Well that's my excuse.

> The only information hidden is that which isn't of any use to the
> situation anyway. You don't need to know exactly how vectors and
> matrices are multiplied,

Yes, *I* do. That's what I'm saying. That's why we don't use operator
overloading, because we prefer to see the information that it hides.

> You regularly have separate programmers coding and optimizing?

Not exactly, but some of us can optimise a lot better than others. Besides we
believe everyone should write code in a way that anyone else can read, and for
our purposes that means at a lower level than true OO.

> Then they're doing it wrong. And what company do you work for? I never
> want to work there.

Naughty Dog, (Jak & Daxter, Crash Bandicoot, and the engine for Ratchett &
Clank), and until recently I worked for Codemasters (on the Toca series of
games). Just a few little multimillion selling titles, I'm sure we don't have a
clue what we're doing.

There are higher level languages and there are lower level languages, you have
to choose what you use according to the nature of what you do. The games
industry has progressed from Assembler to C to using some features of C++, but
(in our case) not all of them, because the nature of the games we develop is
gradually becoming more high level.

In the future we shall doubtless move to a more pure C++ style of code, but it
is naive to presume that assembler is simply inferior to C++. Higher level is
not necessarily better, it depends on the nature of the program you are
developing. We have chosen our level based on many decades of combined
experience of games development, and whilst I may not personaly be able to
explain all the reasons for this (since my OO experience is limitted) I think it
is foolish to assume these intelligent professionals would simply get it wrong.

-- 
Tek
www.evilsuperbrain.com

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