> On 31 Aug 2017, at 23:50, Dave DeLong <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> wonder if I need to go back to school for a degree in Math just to understand
> what’s going on.
To be fair, that’s probably the case. The project is quite extreme (an
implementation of System F, I think Robert Widmann did one in Swift as well),
and I can’t understand it either regardless of syntax. But the point of the
example still stands: To show how extreme you can go with unicode. And from it,
spark some discussion.
I agree that using unicode syntax is a higher barrier for entry, which goes
against the goal of swift to be an easy to learn language.
Nevertheless, I disagree with your matrix example. We already use things like
`+` for “things that we can add together` whatever `add` might mean. So the
same operator is used for (Int, Int) -> Int as for (Double, Double) -> Double.
I do not think it’s a stretch to expect users to know that matrices are
“addable” togethers. Moreover, I would expect that a matrix API provides both
an infix operator as well as a named function for manipulating matrices.
Furthermore, I would argue that using `+` for matrices is more consistent than
the current definition of `+`.
Indeed, the operator `+` is both used for combining numbers and combining
arrays/strings. The inconsistency comes from the fact that it is expected that
`+` is a commutative operator, but concatenation is not a commutative
operation. Therefore the semantics of `+` varies depending on the types that
it’s used on. And, in my opinion, this inconsistency is to be avoided when
dealing with operators. Not to mention that nothing prevent a library to
override `+` with any nonsensical behaviour.
Something I could imagine is deprecate operator overloading and constrain them
to a single Type. For example, the operator `+` could be constrained to the
protocol `Addable` and has the signature `infix func + (Self, Self) -> Self`
and is commutative. Similarly, we could have a protocol `Concatenable` which
has its own operator (e.g.: ++ ) and is not commutative. (those are secretely
`CommutativeMonoid` and `Monoid`). This would allow different operators to
represent different semantics and have them (loosely) enforced, so that nobody
can declare something unexpected like `func + (Int, Array) -> ()`.
In conclusion, I think that the current state of operators should be improved
in some way, regardless of better support for unicode or not. I realise my
stance is quite extreme but I think that it is valuable to talk about it.
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