On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, Dan Sugalski wrote:
: I think that, for me at least, it'll be close enough to C to be
: really confusing. (I already have the problem of leaving parens off
: of my function calls when I write XS code...) There's a certain
: appeal to not having to swap in almost-but-not-quite-the-same sets of
: punctuations when moving from language to language.
And now for something completely not quite different...
bits($x & $y)
bits($x | $y)
That is, bits() could just be a function that takes a superposition
and interprets it as bitops, which makes an odd kind of sense.
Or we could fix the "if this number was never used as a string"
problem by differentiating integer ops from string ops:
intbits($x & $y)
intbits($x | $y)
strbits($x & $y)
strbits($x | $y)
One could maybe shrink that down to
int($x & $y)
int($x | $y)
str($x & $y)
str($x | $y)
Except that's not really much different than:
+($x & $y)
+($x | $y)
_($x & $y)
_($x | $y)
And that would conflict with Damian's current notions of how superpositions
behave in numeric or string context. Still, you can see how
bits(1|2|4|8)
could be made to work even if it really meant
bits(any(1,2,4,8))
Larry, still thinking about a language vaguely resembling Perl 5. :-)
