Re: Re: This is kind of cool

Mark Hahn wrote:

> Paul Prescod wrote:
> 
> 
>>def foo():
>>         return 3
>>
>>def foo.add_(other):
>>         return 2 + other
>>
>>print foo + foo()
> 
> 
> Should I be proud or embarrased that the language I designed supports a
> feature I don't understand :-)
> 
> I see what it is doing, but I don't see why one would want this.

I've never wanted it myself but...Sam is a big fan of operators and 
functional programming.

His talk reminded me of a vague idea I had had for user-defined 
operators. I was thinking of something like:

abc ~+~ def

abc ~add~ def

The basic idea is that you can define binary infix operators that start 
and end with tildes. The tilde-bracketing makes it easy to parse. The 
stuff between the tildes can be almost anything other than whitespace.

I suppose operator precedence is where it starts to get a little 
complicated. It isn't my highest priority so I'm not going to spend 
cycles trying to figure it out...and I'm not sure whether you are 
interested in such a feature.

Sam's talk at the Vanpyz conference is supposed to be on a "little 
language" he designed using generators and Python operator overloading 
for Icon-style stream pattern matching.

  Paul Prescod