Chapter 11. Define Operators Respectfully
In the history of programming languages, operator overloading—the ability to put your own code behind built-in operators like + and *—has had a somewhat checkered career: The very minimalistic C programming language had no room for programmer-defined operators. By contrast, the very expansive C++ embraced operator overloading and included some fairly elaborate facilities to support it. Programmer-defined operators vanished again when Java entered the scene, only to rematerialize again with Ruby.
All of this to-ing and fro-ing betrays a certain ambivalence about programmer-defined operators on the part of language designers. In this chapter we will look at how you define operators for your Ruby classes ...
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