From: jhibschman@... (Johann Hibschman)
Date: 2003-09-23T04:11:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Operator overloading

"Robert Klemme" <bob.news@gmx.net> wrote in message news:<bkmq5r$3dhd5$2@ID-52924.news.uni-berlin.de>...

> You can't.  And you don't need to.  As others pointed out already, Ruby
> treats all the assignment arithmetic operators as shortcuts and invokes
> the appropriate operator.  So

Er.  "You don't need to" is rather extreme.  What about numerical cases?

i.e., if m is a large matrix, then "m += 1" and "m = m + 1" are rather
different beasts, since the "obvioius" interpretation of the first involves
simply incrementing the matrix in place, while the second involves a
copy.

Is there a standard work-around for this?  This was one of the reasons I
stuck with python over ruby, but I've got to admit that I didn't spend a
huge amount of time researching.

Thanks for any info,

-Johann