On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Paul Johnson wrote: > Is that sufficiently vague? Not vague enough, because the current implementation manages to miss the broad side of that semantic barn...
Different operators doing different things sounds awful to me, because it makes it hard to predict what will happen, because new operators will have to be able to control what they do with their operands, and because new types of "array-like" operands will have to tell operators how to treat them. Blech. Maybe treating lazy and/or infinite data structures as "infinitely short" for this purpose would capture most of what we mean, so hype(A,B) would take the longer of two finite lengths, the "more finite" of a finite and an infinite length, and infiniti for two infinite operands. Of course, this still doesn't account for what kind of extension makes most sense for a given operand/operator pair. It seems to me that anything more complex than "undef" (which is consistent with out-of-bounds array accesses) would be a nightmare to get right. /s
