From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2003-03-21T18:14:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal: new operator: '<-' (for assignments)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Phil Tomson" <ptkwt@shell1.aracnet.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ruby
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, March 21, 2003 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: Proposal: new operator: '<-' (for assignments)


> In article <2003320223415.480988@PADD>,
> Austin Ziegler  <austin@halostatue.ca> wrote:
> >On Fri, 21 Mar 2003 11:20:27 +0900, Phil Tomson wrote:
> >> Now of course, I could have allowed access to @val by declaring an
> >> attr_accessor, but in many cases I don't want to expose that
> >> information or make users of the class have to remember the name
> >> of the variable 'val'. It just seems much cleaner in many cases to
> >> have an assignment operator. Up till now I've been overriding '<<'
> >> to do this, but now I've run into a case where I'd like to pass on
> >> operators to the underlying value (@val in the example above)
> >> using method_missing so the underlying value can be shifted (and
> >> since '<<' is overriden, that's kind of tough).
> >
> >Array, String, and Hash use #replace to do this.
> >
>
> Perhaps, but I'm looking for an operator because:
> 1) it's shorter
> 2) the intent of '<-' is pretty clear (in fact it's often used for this in
> pseudocode)

Interesting, but I'm not sure it improves the
language enough to justify the changes.

<opinion>It would surprise me if Matz liked this.</opinion>

Another possibility might be to establish a standard
accessor name as Javascript does and as I did with
my super-iterator class.

  class Array
    def value=(val)
      self.replace val
    end
  end

<opinion>It would surprise me if you liked this. :)</opinion>

Cheers,
Hal