On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 09:08 AM, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote:
I think superpositions will, indeed, be extensively used, but I don't think they'll be called "superpositions" by most of the people that use them. They're typically used more like "set operations". Something as basic asStatements like this bother me. Not because I don't think it might be true, but because it's in future tense. If someone (named Damian :-) wrote a superposition synopsis that showed the many and varied uses of superpositions in contexts that ordinary programmers can relate to, it would bother me less when people make claims about the usefulness of superpositions.
if any($x,$y,$z) > 10 # if ($x | $y | $z) > 10
is pretty useful, even in simple code. As is
my $n = (1..100) | "don't care";
The collapsification to a discrete value would, I imagine, be typically used to select a random entry from a set.
my $r = any(@set);
print $r; # assuming this _does_ collapse
And I'm *really* looking forward to having union/intersection operations, because it solves lots of the typical Cookbook recipes for lists and hashes as one-liners.
This is why I am nervous about introducing terms like eigenbunny, etc., into the general vocabulary of the language. It attempts to make it sound harder than it is, I think -- there are plenty of uses for these operators outside the "collapsing" dynamics they allow. If we focus first on an explanation that does not take directly from quantum mechanics, but rather sort of ...slide... into the QM meanings after explaining the more easily understood "set" meanings, I think it will be quite quickly adopted by newbies.
MikeL
