[COFF] Re: C with Improvements :-)

Without commenting on this judgement, I can tell how the convention came about in a casual conversation. I was perhaps the earliest serious experimenter with C++ overloading, for a constructive solid geometry package in which arithmetic operators were overloaded for matrices and vectors, and boolean operators were overloaded for union and intersection of geometric objects. I've forgotten how object subtraction (e.g. to drill a hole) was represented. Sadly, the symbol vocabulary for overloading was fixed, which meant that two vector products (dot and cross) vied for one operator. Joe Condon put me onto an interesting analog of quotient and remainder in 3D. The quotient. of two vectors, q=a/b is the ratio of the projection of a onto b to b and the remainder r=a%b is the component of a perpendicular to b, The usual quotient-remainder formula holds::a = q*b + r. Once, while discussing some detail of overloading, Bjarne remarked that he'd like to find an attractive notation for stream IO, which printf certainly is not. << and >> immediately popped into my mind. They've been in the language ever since. Equally casually, there was no discussion about the set of operator symbols, so C++ did not come up with a convention for symbol syntax, such as that of Haskell. Doug