On Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 11:58:47AM -0700, ghe wrote: > Well, I don't in any way consider myself a hardware guy, but in Java, > Pascal, C, PERL, Python, FORTRAN, BashScripts, etc, '+' usually does the > same thing every time I type it.
In bash, += can be used to append to a string variable, to increment a pseudo-integer variable, or to append new elements to an array. If you restrict yourself to a raw + sign, it can be a simple string constant that you're printing, or it can be part of an integer addition expression, or it can be the special sentinel of a find -exec command which terminates the -exec and requests xargs(1)-like behavior (aggregation of many arguments into a single call). The use of the same syntactic element with different meanings depending on context is called "overloading". In some programming languages, like C++, this is considered a "feature". You mentioned Java, which probably does a bit of it as well. I don't really know Java, thank gods. For the rest of us, who didn't drink the OO kool-aid, overloading is just a nightmare. What this has to do with hardware, I have no idea.
