From: Tobias Peters <tpeters@...>
Date: 2003-02-04T21:33:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Native rational and complex number implementations?

On Tue, 4 Feb 2003, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> I believe it would be beneficial to have Rational and Complex
> as built-in classes.

Could you tell some concrete expectations from making them built-in, i.e. 
the reasons why you think it would be beneficial?

All that I would like to have built in is a ruby literal for specifying 
complex numbers (a literal for purely imaginary numbers would be 
sufficient, of course) because it's tedious to write

Complex(2,3)

if what you want is

2+3i

(Btw, it would be nice if ruby's parser were dynamically extensible to 
allow adding features like this)

I know I could define a constant I and write

2+3*I

but it's uglier. Also, Complex.to_s would then produce output valid for 
ruby's parser to read.

I don't think significant performance gains are possible by making Complex
built-in because of the templated nature of the Complex class (real and 
imaginary part can be any Numeric except Complex itself).

  T