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expound on limitations of Rust's trait-based operator overloading
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matthew-piziak committed Aug 15, 2016
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11 changes: 8 additions & 3 deletions src/libcore/ops.rs
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//! Overloadable operators.
//!
//! Implementing these traits allows you to get an effect similar to
//! overloading operators.
//! Implementing these traits allows you to overload certain operators.
//!
//! Some of these traits are imported by the prelude, so they are available in
//! every Rust program.
//! every Rust program. Only operators backed by traits can be overloaded. For
//! example, the addition operator (`+`) can be overloaded through the `Add`
//! trait, but since the assignment operator (`=`) has no backing trait, there
//! is no way of overloading its semantics. Additionally, this module does not
//! provide any mechanism to create new operators. If traitless overloading or
//! custom operators are required, you should look toward macros or compiler
//! plugins to extend Rust's syntax.
//!
//! Many of the operators take their operands by value. In non-generic
//! contexts involving built-in types, this is usually not a problem.
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