[context tossed due to top posting.]
On Tue, 8 Jun 2010 14:12:52 -0700 (PDT)
Jason Smith <ja...@lilypepper.com> wrote:
> Why not just treat is as a vector, do vector math operations on it,
> and be done with it? 1+2j is equivalent to [1 2]. 1+2j represents a
> 2-D vector, does it not? Not only does this handle imaginaries, but
> higher forms, such as [1 2 3 4]. The beauty of Lisp is that once you
> accept the basic syntax (atoms and groupings), you don't have to worry
> about developing EBNF forms for every arbitrary "human readable"
> notation.
>
> Or I could be totally wrong.
I think you're totally wrong. You don't have to worry about an EBNF
for every arbitrary notation, but you do need one for the basic types
in the language, so you can write them out and read them back in and
know what you've got.
When you read in an S-expression written by a program, you'd like know
with 100% certainty whether the 2-element vector you read in is a
Complex or just a random 2-element vector. Which means you need a
standard representation over and above the two-element vector to
represent a Complex constant. There's no good reason not to make that
representation something familiar, especially if doing so will help
Clojure better interoperate with other systems.
Clojure already has a couple of numeric types that can be represented
by a vector. Clojure also has rules making otherwise illegal symbols
matching a specific pattern represent each of those types as literals,
which deals with this problem (not sure that's *why* this was done,
but it does deal with the problem.). Adding another pattern for an
otherwise illegal symbol to represent a new numeric type seems like a
logical thing to do.
Besides which, as has been pointed out, tweaking the reader/writer to
do this is relatively trivial compared with working out how complex is
to be integrated into the numeric stack, much less doing that
integration.
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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