From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-08T12:20:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Range behavior (Re: [RCR] New [] Semantics)

On Thu, 2004-10-07 at 19:08, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> There are a couple of other small things that would be nice, but these are the 
> main important ones (IMHO) that I'm interested in solving. Brian and Markus 
> may have other ideas.

     I have lots of other ideas.  At present they are drowned out by the
seductive notion that anyone who can get a significant body of C to do
what they want (and no more) must have the patience of a saint or the
perspicacity of a seer.  Or both.

     That is to say, I'm still trying to get free form operators
working.

     As for Ranges, I tend to favour class trees rather than (as matz
prefers) trying to make one tool serve several purposes.  I would, for
example, give the Range tribe a family tree much like that of Numeric
(with Float, Bignum, Complex, etc.) where different members fill
different rolls but all work together in harmony.

     As I listed before, there are at least four things being done with
ranges (Intervals, Pairs, Point_sets, Iteration_reification (including
circular/end-based indexing) and perhaps others).  I would like to see
them teased apart but haven't devoted much effort to doing so myself.

     Instead, since that isn't what matz wants, I am exploring my second
option; making it possible for users to flesh out their own hierarchy as
they see fit, without being sent to a syntactic ghetto.  Thus my
interest in define-your-own operators.  The idea first came up in the
context of Hash, where much the same discussion took place, with some
people wanting finer control over the details of Hash behaviour, while
others liked it being a single type.

     My silly hope is that it may be possible to make everyone happy, by
increasing the flexibility of ruby in very specific ways (as discussed a
few weeks back); we may be able to let people play with detailed class
trees without breaking much (if any) existing code.  Then, if someone
cooks up a clear winner, that can be considered for inclusion in the
core language.

     -- Markus