From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2004-10-09T09:24:44+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

In article <4166FD1B.2020604@thepierianspring.org>,
Randy W. Sims <ml-ruby@thepierianspring.org> wrote:
>Charles Hixson wrote:
>
>> | .< 1 + 3, 5 * 2, 6 / 3 >. .<n21, n22, n23>. .<n31, n32, n33>. | .*. M
>
>A perfect example of why free-form-operators are a bad idea. ;-)
>
>No offense intended. It's just that custom notations are not obvious to 
>readers/maintainers of the code. Also, adding such flexibility to the 
>parser means it is probably less capable of recognizing and diagnosing 
>errors. Then there is the problem of clashes when multiple extensions 
>try to define the same ops for entirely different operations.
>

I think this patch is quite cool and I even have immediate applications 
for it (the much discussed ':=' operator)... However, I have the same 
concern mentioned above.  It seems that it could make it more difficult 
to detect some syntax errors. Couldn't it also lead to some parsing 
ambiguities?

Phil