On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 2:52 AM, Antoon Pardon
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On 26-03-14 03:56, MRAB wrote:
>> Or as a root operator, e.g. 3 √ x (the cube root of x).
>>
> Personally I would think such an operator is too limited to include in a
> programming language.
> This kind of notation is only used with a constant to indicate what kind of
> root is taken and
> only with positive integers. Something like the equivallent of the following
> I have never seen.
>
> t = 2.5
> x = 8.2
> y = t √ x
An example is taking the geometric mean of an arbitrary number of values:
product = functools.reduce(operator.mul, values, 1)
n = len(values)
geometric_mean = n √ product
I might argue though for the inverted syntax (product √ n) to more
closely parallel division.
> Of course we don't have to follow mathematical convention with python.
> However allowing any
> unicode symbol as an identifier doesn't prohibit from using √ as an operator.
> We do have
> "in" and "is" as operators now, even if they would otherwise be acceptable
> identifiers.
> So I wonder, would you consider to introduce log as an operator. 2 log x
> seems an interesting
> operation for a programmer.
If it's going to become an operator, then it has to be a keyword.
Changing a token that is currently allowed to be an identifier into a
keyword is generally avoided as much as possible, because it breaks
backward compatibility. "in" and "is" have both been keywords for a
very long time, perhaps since the initial release of Python.
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