From: Eivind Eklund <eeklund@...>
Date: 2004-10-10T03:59:05+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

On Sat, 9 Oct 2004 23:20:41 +0900, David A. Black <dblack@wobblini.net> wrote:
> On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Hal Fulton wrote:
> > I stand by the abstraction: A sufficiently open system can be turned against
> > itself to undermine that openness.
> >
> > There are millions of ways to concretize that abstraction, but most of those
> > are otherwise unrelated to each other, and they range from the momentous to
> > the inconsequential. I have no reason and no desire to compare you to a terrorist
> > or any other form of criminal.
> >
> > If you don't believe there is such a thing as "too much flexibility," then we
> > will have to agree to disagree.
> 
> Just so Hal doesn't feel all alone, I'll put in a note of skepticism
> :-)  I'm not eager for Ruby to have, in essence, no fixed syntax.  I
> think Ruby's strength lies largely in its specificity as a language --
> a language that is good at domain-specific things, but still a
> particular language -- and if it were turned into a kind of
> proto-language, I would feel a sense of loss.  Also, I don't want to
> have to learn new syntactic rules every time I want to read a program
> or use a library.

Count me on the side of the sceptics.  I have the precise worry that
David express here.

There is one limitation on the concept that I think might mitigate my
fears (I've not quite decided yet):  Restrict it to work for very
specific domain languages.

In other words, make it so you have to do an
operator_eval(my_operator_set) {
   ... code with weird operators here ...
}
to make it work.

However, I'm not certain how the utility of extra operators with that
restriction would turn out.

Eivind.