From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-09T14:30:15+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 21:27, Jim Weirich wrote:
> trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> > Spaces b/c important, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. A rule that 
> > operator "on top of operator" requires a space solves problem. So
> > 
> >   '!1' or '! 1' 
> > 
> > is fine, but two in a row must be 
> > 
> >   '! !1' or '! ! 1', not '!!1' 
> 
> This is fine, but at this point you are making incompatible changes to 
> Ruby.  I don't want user defined operators nearly so much that I would 
> want to break existing code.

     T (I never know what to call you.  Trans?  Someone said "Tom" once,
but I don't know if that was a guess)--anyway "T" pretty much nailed the
syntactic issue, but didn't get into how I am attempting to resolve it. 
Short answer: if a concatenation of operator symbols might be ambiguous
I generate a warning (suggesting that spaces be used) and interpret it
as two separate operators (e.g., mimic the old behaviour).  If you want
free form operators, and want to have them overlap with the existing
operators, you have to use spaces to make your meaning clear.

    -- Markus