From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-09-23T17:36:10+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5081] Re: Crazy idea? infix method calls

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:5077] Crazy idea? infix method calls"
    on 00/09/23, hal9000@hypermetrics.com <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> writes:

|What if Ruby could have user-definable methods that could be
|called as infix operators?

Hmm.

|  x.mymethod(5,0,1)  #  All of these
|  x.mymethod(5,0)    # method calls
|  x.mymethod(5)      # would do
|  x mymethod 5       # the same thing...

First of all, more than 10 years ago I designed the language named
`Classic', which has the syntax just like this.  But infix method was
not really convenient.

Second of all, Ruby 1.6 consider

>  x mymethod 5       # the same thing...

as x(mymethod(5)).  So I'm afraid infix method invocation raises
ambiguity. 

Speaking of syntax enhancement, method as left hand side of
assignment, e.g.

  str.substr(2,5) = "abc"

might be interesting.

							matz.