On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 9:40 PM, Michael Zedeler <mich...@zedeler.dk> wrote:
> > What started it all, was the intention to extend the operator, making it > possible to evaluate it in list context. Doing so has opened pandoras box, > because many (most? all?) solutions are inconsistent with the rule of least > surprise. > I don't think there's any coherent expectation, and therefore no potential to avoid surprise. Returning comic books might be more of a surprise, but as long as you're returning a string which appears to be "in the range" expressed, then I don't see surprise as the problem. > > For instance, when considering strings, writing up an expression like > > 'goat' ~~ 'cow' .. 'zebra' > > This makes sense in most cases, because goat is lexicographically between > cow and zebra. This presumes that we're treating a string as a "number" in base x (where x, I guess would be the number of code points which share ... what, any of the general category properties of the components of the input strings? That begins to get horrendously messy very, very fast: say "1aB" .. "aB1" > I'd suggest that if you want to evaluate a Range in list context, you may > have to provide a hint to the Range generator, telling it how to generate > subsequent values. Your suggestion that the expansion of 'Ab' .. 'Be' > should yield <Ab Ac Ad Ae Bb Bc Bd Be> is just an example of a different > generator (you could call it a different implementation of ++ on Str types). > It does look useful, but by realizing that it probably is, we have two > candidates for how Ranges should evaluate in list context. > I think the solution here is to evaluate what's practical in the general case. Your examples are, I think misleading because they involve English words and we naturally leap to "sure, that one's in the dictionary between the other two." However, let me pose this dictionary lookup for you: "cliché" ~~ "aphorism" .. "truth" Now, you see where this is going? What happens when we throw in some punctuation? "father-in-law" ~~ "dad" .. "stranger" The problem is that you have a complex heuristic in mind for determining membership, and a very simple operator for expressing the set. Worse, I haven't even gotten into dealing with Unicode where it's entirely reasonable to write "TOPIXコンポジット1500構成銘柄" which I shamelessly grabbed from a Tokyo Stock Exchange page. That one string, used in everyday text, contains Latin letters, Hiragana, Katakana, Han or Kanji idiograms and Latin digits. Meanwhile, back to ".." ... the range operator. The most useful application that I can think of for strings of length > 1 is for generating unique strings such as for mktemp. Beyond that, its application is actually quite limited, because the rules for any other sort of string that might make sense to a human are absurdly complex. As such, I think it suffices to say that, for the most part, ".." makes sense for single-character strings, and to expand from there, rather than trying to introduce anything more complex. -- Aaron Sherman Email or GTalk: a...@ajs.com http://www.ajs.com/~ajs
