On Thu, 26 Sep 2002, Sean O'Rourke wrote: > Different operators doing different things sounds awful to me, because it > makes it hard to predict what will happen, because new operators will have > to be able to control what they do with their operands, and because new > types of "array-like" operands will have to tell operators how to treat > them. Blech. > > Maybe treating lazy and/or infinite data structures as "infinitely short" > for this purpose would capture most of what we mean, so hype(A,B) would > take the longer of two finite lengths, the "more finite" of a finite and > an infinite length, and infiniti for two infinite operands.
Sounds reasonable. > Of course, this still doesn't account for what kind of extension makes > most sense for a given operand/operator pair. It seems to me that > anything more complex than "undef" (which is consistent with out-of-bounds > array accesses) would be a nightmare to get right. We should respect default values if arrays can declare them. Perhaps there will be a modifier for operator declarations to declare what the default behavior should be. Otherwise I don't know how different behaviors for different operators would be possible, especially for user-defined operators. sub operator:foo is hyper_default(1) ... I agree with "Blech", but we can procrasticate doing it at least until Damian makes it clear how operators will define their behavior. Otherwise, a contextualized undef (0 in numeric context, '' in string) would seem DWIM to me. I wouldn't want to throw tons of warnings from one operation, so maybe hyper-operating on unequal lengths gets a new warning, instead of throwing lots of 'undefined value' warnings. ~ John Williams
