From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-14T08:25:03+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 13:13, Charles Hixson wrote:
> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> 
> >Hi,
> >
> >In message "Re: ANN: Free-form-operators patch"
> >    on Mon, 11 Oct 2004 17:38:39 +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> writes:
> >
> >|I haven't settled my opinion about this patch.  Surely this is a
> >|interesting change, but has some concerns.
> >
> >One thing to add:
> >
> >* This patch makes difficult to add new operators in the language in
> >  the future.  For example, I might feel like to add '->' behave as
> >  lambda as in Perl6.
> >
> >							matz.
> >
> One way to handle that (changing the patch a bit) is to require all user 
> defined operators to be of the form \|.*\| e.g., |+|, or |-|.  That 
> would allow all user defined operators to be easily distinguished from 
> the built-ins.  This would allow any desired builtins to be added later, 
> and also make the user defined operators readily recognizable.

     That should be a trivial patch to the patch, if that seems to
increase the net happiness of the world.  If others speak in favor of
the idea I'll work it up (*smile* or you are of course free to try your
hand at it if you prefer).  

    -- Markus

P.S. I am taking the "." in your regexp to mean "any operator character"
and not "any character" as the later would lead to untold complications.