From: ptkwt@...1.aracnet.com (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2003-03-22T03:44:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal: new operator: '<-' (for assignments)

In article <003701c2ef8a$e05cd220$0300a8c0@austin.rr.com>,
Hal E. Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> wrote:
>----- 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>

Yeah, I didn't figure the chances were too great, but it was worth a try 
anyway ;-)

>
>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>

Well, I'll probably just stick with using '<<' as a synonym or 'assign' 
and alias the original '<<' shift functionality of Fixnum to 'shift'

Phil