Re: Allowing custom number literal suffixes?

All this talk about such trivial and obviously reasonable changes to cgi.rb 
and no word on whether that will be even considered for commit. Is it any 
wonder then something as interesting as "number literal suffixes" gets no 
response at all? If you ask me it's pretty sad. I hope its just because of 
the time of the year.

BTW, I recommend a better notation than "def number_literal_x", perhaps "def 
@x" or "def #x".

T.

On Sunday 26 December 2004 11:02 pm, Florian Groß wrote:
| Moin!
|
| On the ruby-muse mailing list which is a place for discussion of new
| ideas for Ruby there recently was a sub-thread concerning the
| introduction of user-defined number literal suffixes. These suffixes are
| already used in other languages and look like 1.5f or 0.6r. I think
| having these would be nice for user-defined numeric Classes like
| Rational (currently these overload 1/2 under mathn and other operations
| which can be a problem) and imaginary numbers (via the Complex class). I
| think being able to write 0.5r instead of the much longer
| Rational.reduce(1, 2), 2i instead of Complex.new(2, 1) or 5.1b instead
| of BigDecimal.new("5.1") would be a nice thing that would not have many
| downsides.
|
| Peter Vanbroekhoven was able to come up with a fairly simple and
| efficient patch which I have reattached to this mail. With it applied
| you can write 1.5x and it will call number_literal_x("1.5") and return
| the result.
|
| However I might be overlooking issues that are associated with this
| enhancement and I know that having useless features leads to language
| bloat. So what do the community and matz think about this? Would this be
| useful to you?
|
| Thank you all in advance for feedback.
|
| Regards,
| Florian Gross

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