From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2001-05-15T23:50:33+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:15166] operator idea

I like the feature of Ruby that automatically generates the
operator += from +.

It is exactly right for the simplicity of use.

On the other hand, for the performance, it could make sense to
do it the in other way round:

Allowing the definition of  +=() which automatically generates 
the operator +().

In most cases it would be much more effective: for example for
the case of 
   x=a+b+c+d+e
the parser could generate the calls:
   x=a.dup;
	x+= b;
	x+= c;
	x+= d;
	x+= e;
and could eliminate a lot of allocations.

Or for example look at the benchmarks at 
<http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/strcat/>

You can see how suboptimal the current += operator performs 
for strings in the example:

  for i in 1 .. n
     str += "hello\n"
  end


I don't think it's too late:
One could preserve the current mechanism, but
also enable the definition of += operator which would 
override the original + operator. So one would have both
compatibility and could boost speed in a lot of situations.

Just an idea...

Best regards, Christian