On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:37 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Tristan Zajonc > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Following up on the discussion about operator overloading, what are > viable > > options for introducing novel infix operators or a class of > > extended/prefixed operators? > > > > For motivation, I along with some others have implemented a MATLAB/R like > > environment for JS. We've written a compile-to-js language that supports, > > among other things, operator overloading and prefixed operators, However > > we'd much prefer to follow ES6/7 and ideally avoid the need for a > > compile-to-js language entirely, at least in the future. Without going > into > > the details, prefixed operators are useful for defining objectwise and > > elementwise operations on matrices, which is a core type in technical > > computing (see Julia, MATLAB, Mata, Python PEP 225). > > > > Assuming JS allowed prefixed operators: > > > > 1. What would be the most likely syntax? As a reference, Julia and > Matlab > > use dots, a .+ b. Stata's Mata languages uses colons, a :+ b. PEP225 > > proposes tildle a ~+ b. R uses %infix% but this is widely viewed as a > bad > > choice. The technical community would prefer dots. I know these > prefixes > > all having meanings alone, but does .op introduce any ambiguity? Are > there > > other lightweight options? > > Yes, .op is completely unusable. "foo .bar" is identical to "foo.bar". > > Sorry, at most I'm only proposing every *existing* operator prefixed by ., not new operators. So things like .+, ./, .*, .-., .%, .==, .!=, .>, .<, etc. These would be called dot operators. This is all that's required by the technical computing use case. There's a question of whether to allow arbitrary operators, which would require a new symbol obviously. I personally don't think arbitrary operators are worth the noise and complexity. I'd leave this issue to macros.
_______________________________________________ es-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss
