> You can do this in any language that has operator overloading, right?
The thing is that language and standard library designers don't do that.
And if you are not hellbent on creating your own collection library and using it everywhere, even when interfacing with system functions that don't understand it you pretty much have no way of swapping out your data structures without carefully replacing all lines that access them.
Scala standard collection library designers are the only ones I know of that actually went through the trouble of making this for us.
The thing is that language and standard library designers don't do that.
And if you are not hellbent on creating your own collection library and using it everywhere, even when interfacing with system functions that don't understand it you pretty much have no way of swapping out your data structures without carefully replacing all lines that access them.
Scala standard collection library designers are the only ones I know of that actually went through the trouble of making this for us.