Nathan Torkington wrote:
>
> Actually, the only refinement I'd like to see is that boolean operators
> (==, &&, ||) be excepted from the distributive rule.
>
> This is to permit:
>
> if (@a == @b) # shallow comparison
>
> and
>
> @a = @b || @c; # @a=@b or @a=@c; # ish
Yeah, I agree completely with this sentiment. This is far more useful to
me than having them element-wise.
My main fear is that while this RFC seems really good for math ops, but
seems too array- and PDL-specific. Here are some examples of mixed
contexts; how would these be handled under the RFC?
@user_data = @empty || $user;
%files = scalar(get_files()) || @DEFAULT;
$total = @items + $MIN_VALUE;
@full_names = @first_names . "Smith";
What I'd like to see is Perl to really DWIM (especially in that last
one). But to do so you have to redo the rules of the RFC:
Op Type Default homogenous context Mixed context
--------------- ------------------------------
--------------------------
Math ops element-wise forced to scalar
Boolean ops whole entity forced to list
String ops element-wise forced to list
With these rules, the above examples now work as I'd expect (or at least
want) them to:
@user_data = @empty || $user; # @user_data =
($user);
%files = scalar(get_files()) || @DEFAULT; # %files =
(@DEFAULT);
$total = @items + $MIN_VALUE; # $total = 5 + 2;
@full_names = @first_names . "Smith"; # @full_names = ("Bob
Smith", "Jim Smith");
True, this opens a whole other can of worms, but I think it's closer to
what people would want to use the ops for, and it's also more usable to
us non-PDLers. Note there's a lot of inherent want()-like behavior built
in there.
-Nate
