I would love to have a way to write function calls infix. That may cover your
use case as well. That is (strawman syntax):
arg1 #func arg2
would be syntactic sugar for
func(arg1, arg2)
Advantages: more versatile, less grawlixy. Problem: would make much more sense
with multiple dispatch (dynamic dispatch over the arguments), but that doesn’t
seem to be in the cards for JavaScript.
On 30 Oct 2013, at 4:01 , 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?
>
> 2. Is there a preferred class literal syntax? I believe the proposed value
> object syntax would be perfect if extended to classes as well.
>
> 3. Can this be done prior to macros? It may be my narrow matrix centered
> view, but I do not believe there's a compelling need for arbitrary infix
> operators in technical computing if it introduces additional difficulties.
>
> With ES6 and these operators I believe JS/NodeJS could easily take over the
> technical and statistical computing domains.
>
> Tristan
--
Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
[email protected]
home: rauschma.de
twitter: twitter.com/rauschma
blog: 2ality.com
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