On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Angel Faus wrote:
: Could we please, please, please have bitwise operators be out of the
: core. We expect that they are not going to be used by the average
: user, so it looks fair to apply the ultimate negative huffman
: enconding: they need to be specially required.
:
: A simple "use bitwise" would be ok. That would provide a proper
: manpage to explain the meta-operators thing, and would shorten the
: main list, which is something that we desperatelly need.
Fine by me. Could force people to declare hyper and super, for all that...
: On other order of things: if it is about providing context to an
: operation, wouldn't an adverb be more natural?
:
: So it would be something like this:
:
: $c = $a | $b; # superposition
: $c = $a | $b : int; # integer bitwise
: $c = $a | $b : str; # char bitwise
: $c = $a | $b : bool; # bool bitwise
Has the "long term" problem, not to be confused with the long-term problem...
Also has the "oh by the way" problem we're trying to get away from with
regex modifiers.
: This can be expanded to other context-requiring cases:
:
: $c = $a / $b; # float division
: $c = $a / $b : int; # integer division
:
: Admitedly, it's more verbose. But again this is Huffman encoding at
: use.
As long as we're admitting things, I'll admit that
$c = $a +/ $b; # integer division
looks pretty weird too. But in this case, the historical
$c = int($a / $b); # integer division
at least ends up with the right semantics (by accident).
: Or, speaking aloud, we could move the adverb just along the operator,
: tying them together visually:
:
: $c = $a |:int $b;
: $c = $a &:str $b;
:
: But honestly, that looks weird.
And is essentially the same thing as
$c = $a +| $b;
$c = $a ~& $b;
only with the context on the other end.
Larry
