On Wed, 1 Jun 2005 19.37, Damian Conway wrote: > Deborah Pickett wrote: > > Someone please convince me otherwise. > So what you want is not an identity value as default (which isn't even > possible for many operators, as Luke pointed out), but a predictable > failure value as default, so you can intercept that failure and choose your > own outcome in the edge case.
You haven't convinced me, but rather than flog a dead horse, I'll just suggest that we both reserve the right to say "I told you so" when there are several years' worth of Perl 6 code out there, and we see how common our respective examples are. Meanwhile, it's safer to take the "fail" course of action, because it can be relaxed later on; the converse couldn't be true. What you and Luke *have* convinced me of is that the one-element list rule isn't right either; for operators like <, it still makes sense to fail in some soft way on one-element lists: $ordered = ([<] @array) // 1; # Zero- and one-element arrays get the 1. I'm starting to agree that there have to be different rules for associative* and non-associative reduction. * Left and right association might need to be different too in terms of the order they eat list elements. -- Debbie Pickett [EMAIL PROTECTED]
