From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-01-25T14:36:09+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01178] Re: Possible bug in ruby-man-1.4

In message "[ruby-talk:01177] Re: Possible bug in ruby-man-1.4"
    on 00/01/24, Dave Thomas <Dave@thomases.com> writes:

|>   % perl -le 'print -2**2'
|>   -4
|>   % python -c 'print -2**2'
|>   -4
|>   % ruby -e 'p -2**2'
|>   -4
|>   % ruby.new -e 'p -2**2'
|>   4
|
|Now there's a problem ;-(
|
|Maybe the answer is to get rid of the concept of negative numeric
|literals, so there's never any ambiguity as to whether -2 is a literal 
|of a method call? Then, as an optimization, the parser could notice
|<Fixnum>.-@ terminal pairs and replace them with a negated
|Fixnum.

That is the current behavior (without optimization). 

The problem is about the contradiction below.

                                                   current modified
  -13.remainder(4) => better be (-13).remainder(4)   yes      no
  -2**2            => better be -(2**2)              no       yes

There may be good syntax rules to solve this.

							matz.