Bill Baxter wrote:
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
Lars T. Kyllingstad wrote:
The fundamental reason why I want opPow so badly is in fact not even how
often I use it. If that was the case, I'd want a special "writefln" operator
as well. The main reason is that exponentiation is such a basic mathematical
operation, right up there with addition and multiplication, that it deserves
an operator of its own.
Hmmm. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with remainder are
all closed over integers. Power isn't. It's not even closed over real
numbers. That makes it quite special and quite non-basic.
Uh, but a/b is not a "division with remainder" operator. It's just
division-with-a-remainder-silently-ignored.
The result of a/b is the quotient resulting from a division with
remainder. If you want the remainder use a%b (the compiler will
peephole-optimize that). I don't see anything wrong with what I said.
If you want to define pow in the same way as a "pow with remainder but
with the remainder ignored" then there's nothing stopping you.
1^^-1 == 1
2^^-1 == 0
4^^(1/2) == 2
5^^(1/2) == 2
Though I'd rather go the other direction and make the
remainder-dropping integer division use a different symbol a la
Python.
You'd need to show that "power with remainder" as you just defined it is
useful theoretically and/or practically. The usefulness of integral
division is absolutely massive.
Anyhow, all I did was to explain that a particular argument that was
made is invalid. That doesn't mean other arguments are invalid. All I'd
hope is that ^^ doesn't suddenly become a time sink when we have so much
other stuff to worry about. Again: ^^ was a lot more attractive to me
when it seemed like a slam dunk.
Andrei
