From: Wilson Bilkovich <wilsonb@...>
Date: 2006-12-22T01:51:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Method named ***(other)

On 12/21/06, Julien Gaugaz <gaugaz@l3s.de> wrote:
> >
> > Julien Gaugaz wrote:
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> It's several hours now that i'm trying to find out what's special with
> >> *** for a method name, without success :(
> >
> > That should be your clue. There _isn't_ anything special about "***",
> > whereas the infix operators that exist in Ruby that you can redefine
> > require special treatment by the interpreter. You can't expand the set
> > of operators, and '***' isn't among them.
> Ah, ok, thanks a lot. I understood why i could use '***' as an infix
> operator. But still, there shouldn't be any difference between a call
> like m.*** n  and m.triple_star n... But it seems there is since
> m.triple_star works and m.*** don't.
>
> I don't get it.
>

The basic problem is that ** is right-associative, and * is
left-associative.  The existing grammar can't resolve the apparent
conflict.
Also, *** is unreadably nasty, so it's good that you can't name a
method that. :)