From: Jamis Buck <jgb3@...>
Date: 2004-02-03T23:23:32+09:00
Subject: Re: flip flop operator and assignment

nobu.nokada@softhome.net wrote:

>Hi,
>
>At Tue, 3 Feb 2004 13:08:50 +0900,
>Jamis Buck wrote:
>  
>
>>So, instead of '..' and '...', how about something completely new, like 
>>perhaps '--', or '~~'?  Or even a new keyword, like 'flip' or 
>>'flipflop'?  It would be nice to also somehow provide a way to access 
>>some underlying objectified represention of the flip-flop, so that its 
>>state could be queried and manipulated,
>>    
>>
>
>Ruby already has both of unary and binary '-' operators, so the
>former will conflict.  But '~' operator is only unary now, the
>later wouldn't.
>
>  
>
Good point.  Another option would be to retain the use of the '..' and 
'...', but prefix any flip-flop expression with some disambiguating 
operator or keyword, a la:

  a .. b      #-> range
  flip a..b  # -> flip-flop

With that, you could then add another piece of syntax to obtain the 
internal "objectified" representation:

  flip a..b => c

The expression would still return boolean, as the regular flip-flop, but 
would assign the object to 'c', which could then be manipulated and queried:

  current_value = c.get_state
  c.set_state( false )

- Jamis

-- 
Jamis Buck
jgb3@email.byu.edu

ruby -h | ruby -e 'a=[];readlines.join.scan(/-(.)\[e|Kk(\S*)|le.l(..)e|#!(\S*)/) {|r| a << r.compact.first };puts "\n>#{a.join(%q/ /)}<\n\n"'