I will vote for "+", although I learn mathematics. Maybe that is why I am not a mathematician.
Yi On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 10:45 PM, Stefan Karpinski <ste...@karpinski.org> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Ivar Nesje <iva...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> We should really create a simple system where you can get those hints >> printed in the REPL, without defining more methods. > > > Yes, I think we should really pursue this avenue. > > For what it's worth - and perhaps something since I'm the original > perpetrator of the str*str concatenation syntax - I've come to regret this > operator choice. My reasoning at this point is that we want our operators > to have fairly "pure" meanings. I chose str*str because concatenation can > be viewed as a kind of multiplication in the ring of string patterns > (alternation in the regex sense is the addition operation, the empty string > is the unit and the non-matching pattern is the zero). However, many > operations can be viewed as a form of multiplication. In the max-plus > algebra <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max-plus_algebra>, for example, > addition is the multiplication operator. So, at this point I think we > should stick to very pure classical meanings for operators in Base - the > Base.* function should be just addition of numbers in the classical sense, > not the broader sense of addition in any conceivable ring. > >
