On 2009-08-10 13:56:53 -0400, Miles <____...@_______.____> said:
Don wrote:
You didn't respond to my assertion: even if you _could_ do it, why would
you want to? ** sucks as an exponential operator. I dispute the
contention that ** is a natural choice. It comes from the same language
that brought you IF X .NE. 2
There are too many languages that support ** as an exponentiation
operator, that is the reason ** is a likely candidate. Your reasoning
seemed to be:
- Fortran is bad;
- Fortran had ** as its exponentiation operator;
- So, ** is bad as an exponentiation operator.
I don't care for ** or .NE., really. I don't like * as a multiplication
operator, in fact. I'd rather have × as multiplication, ↑ as
exponentiation, ∧ as logical and, ∨ as logical or, ¬ as a logical not, =
as equality, ≠ as inequality and ← as assignment.
HyperTalk used to have <> for inequality, but ≠ worked too. You could
write >= for greater or equal, but ≥ worked too. That said, having = as
equality in a C-derived language is somewhat problematic.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.com
http://michelf.com/
