[ruby-core:83482] [Ruby trunk Feature#2013][Rejected] [PATCH] a = *b calls b.*@

Issue #2013 has been updated by mame (Yusuke Endoh).

Status changed from Assigned to Rejected

I'm closing this ticket since the discussion has been stalled completely.

I still think this is an interesting proposal.  If you (or anyone else) are interested in this feature, please create a new ticket.  It would be good to reimplement it for trunk, and to investigate its merit on real-world applications and the compatibility problem.

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Feature #2013: [PATCH] a = *b calls b.*@
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/2013#change-67489

* Author: jeremye (Jeremy Evans)
* Status: Rejected
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
* Target version: Next Major
----------------------------------------
=begin
 This makes the * operator operate more similarly to the + and - operators.  The binary versions of + and - call methods named + and -, while the unary versions call methods named +@ and -@.  The binary * operator calls the method named *, but the unary * operator calls the method to_a currently, and used to call to_ary in 1.8.6 (and at some point may have called to_splat).
 
 I think this makes for more consistent behavior, and hopefully it isn't just a foolish consistency.  I brought up this idea as a question in Shugo Maeda's presentation at RubyKaigi 2009, and discussed it with Matz at Lone Star Ruby Conf 2009, and he thought the idea had merit.
 
 Here's a basic example how this would look:
 
   class MultiplePersonality
     def *@
       [self, [self, self]]
     end
   end
 
   mp = MultiplePersonality.new
   p1, mp2 = *mp
 
 This comes with a patch that appears to work from my simple testing, but this is my first time working with the internal ruby code, so I apologize in advance if it doesn't do things correctly.
 
 The patch modifies parse.y so the above is no longer a syntax error.  It adds a USTAR token to the parser to represent that *@ token.  It modifies the splatting to call *@ instead of to_a.  Also, for backwards compatibility, it adds *@ to BasicObject, and has it call to_a if it responds to to_a.  This allows code that defines to_a and expects that the unary * operator will call to_a to still work.  
 
 This patch is mostly for consistency, but it also allows the programmer to make to_a return one thing, and the unary * operator return something else.  I can think of the following use case:
 
   # Represents an abstract set of rows in the database
   class Dataset
     def to_a
       retrieve_database_rows
     end
     def *@
       [self]
     end
   end
   dataset = Dataset.new
 
   # Explicitly asking for an array means I want
   # an array of database rows represented by the
   # dataset.
   rows = dataset.to_a
 
   # If the dataset had any rows, I want to debug print
   # each row separately.  However, if it did not have
   # any rows, I want to debug print the dataset itself.
   p(*(rows.empty? ? dataset : rows))
 
 I'd like to thank Eleanor McHugh for helping me find the key part of ruby that needed to be modified to support this (in vm_insnhelper.c).
=end


---Files--------------------------------
unary_star_op_svn.diff (3.99 KB)


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