On 05/25/2016 01:08 PM, Martin Tschierschke wrote:
On Monday, 23 May 2016 at 20:01:08 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
So swap(a, b) swaps the contents of a and b. This could be easily
generalized to multiple arguments such that swap(a1, a2, ..., an)
arranges things such that a1 gets an, a2 gets a1, a3 gets a2, etc. I
do know applications for three arguments. Thoughts? -- Andrei
A newbee question about language design:
When I looked first time at Ruby I liked the simple a,b = b,a syntax,
so swap. Would it be theoretically possible to allow this?
And if not, where does it breaks the general language design?
Best regards mt.
No fundamental breakage except probably for DRY violation (consider a
and b may be arbitrarily complicated expressions yielding lvalues).
Also, if expressions are involved everything must be carefully defined
so e.g.
(a[f()], b[i++]) = (b[i++], a[f()])
defines what operations are executed and in what order.
The swap assignment is cute and I used to like it a lot more until I
figured adds more problems than it solves.
Andrei