From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-09T14:35:19+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

On Fri, 2004-10-08 at 21:47, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> On Saturday 09 October 2004 12:27 am, 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.
> 
> Sure. I understand. But I wonder how often two operators are used back to 
> back? I imagine that the most common case is !-1. And actually I think - + 
> should probably be considered literal "numeral" chars when in front of other 
> such chars always. Just the same, given the infrequency, I don't think it's 
> out of the question, unless I've over looked some common idioms. Think of 
> any?

     No, but going through the day's feedback I found a uncommon one:

x = proc {|a,*|a}

takes one or more arguments and returns the first one, unless you've
applied my patch in which case it blows up.

    I'm fixing all known bugs to post a new version in an hour or so,
but this seems pretty perverse to me.  Why not just write:
 
x = proc {|a,*ignore|a}

or something?

   -- Markus