On 2/23/06, Jonathan Lang wrote:
(Another possibility would be to return a list of every possible result when in list context, with the result that you'd get in scalar context being element zero of the list. This even has its uses wrt sqrt(Num), providing a two-element list of the positive and negative roots, in that order. This option would apply to sqrt, exp, log, and the trig functions.)
I was thinking functions like sqrt would return a disjunction... I suppose it's probably still most useful to return a single scalar by default, so there would be some pragma via which you could choose to get lists or to get junctions when there's more than one possible result.
(Perhaps if you <use Complex>, the default might be to return junctions or lists on the grounds that you're trying to be more mathematical?)
-David
