Operator Overloading in AS3 With Realaxy Editor

In the previous post about Realaxy Editor we spoke about the Traits language, which lets you take advantage of multiple inheritance. Now we turn to another noteworthy opportunity: operator overloading.

Realaxy ActionScript Editor (RASE) is available here (for Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux). Note: if it is your first experience with the editor, please read the RASE how-to.

Intoduction

One of the major features added to the RASE beta 10 is operator overloading support, allowing developers to change how the operators (*, +, etc) behave in different circumstances. This feature, as well as multiple inheritance, is an object of a holy war between ardent supporters of two different programming paradigms.

The advantages of overloading operators are obvious:

1. Compact style. Your programs might become shorter and more readable; for example, it's much easier to use something like a*b*c than a.multiply(b).multiply(с).
2. Code often looks more natural. Well defined operator is easier to understand and remember than the name of function a function name. For example, combining two variables of type Point you would prefer to see something like point1 + point2, but not point1.plus(point2).

The real argument against operator overloading is the losing of the control over your code. It is unclear, sometimes, where an operator is overloaded, and where it is not. Adding an overloaded operator invokes changes in the behavior of existing code that might lead to some unexpected consequences.

Operator overloading is not included in ActionScript (ECMA3) even though it is proposed for Standard ECMA4. Java does not support operator overloading but both Groovy (“Java with syntactic sugar”) and Scala do. Furthermore, C#'s operators may be overloaded.

One cannot say whether it is a good or bad thing. However, it is also practically assured that sometimes it is a virtual must-have. For example, when chaining multiple mathematical operations, operator overloading really makes code much more concise, thus improving your understanding of the way it works. But enough theory — let's refer ourselves to practice.

We talk about a language extension overloadedOperators that was introduced in RASE since Beta 10 (build 8145+).

An easy way to import it (or any other language) to your project is to press Ctrl+L (Cmd+L) within Realaxy Editor.

By the way, overloadedOperators in RASE is just a port of the overloadedOperators language from the Jetbrains MPS platform. We just decided not to reinvent the wheel and after investigating the target application domain, came to the conclusion that the Jetbrains solution appears to be sufficient, and meets all our needs. We have added some small bonus features from us.

We believe, that this is the right way of the Language Oriented Programming that takes the best from other languages and customizes it for own needs. Read more about this later in our forthcoming articles on the creation of language extensions.

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Step 1

Create a new project with a module inside.

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