Luke Palmer wrote:
> Scott Walters writes:
> > Would it be possible to subclass things on the fly, returning a
> > specialized object representing the argument that knew how to
> > vectorize when asked to add? Aren't add, subtract, multiply, and so
> > on, implemented as class methods in Perl 6, much like Perl 5's
> > overload module?
>
> No! And I couldn't be happier! They're multimethods, dispatching based
> on I<both> their arguments, not just the left one.
Exactly how far can we go without the "each" tags? We could define
multimethods for the standard operators such that if one or both of their
arguments are lists, they're treated as distributed functions, which would
cover a _lot_ of ground on its own. However, there's a problem with
extensibility: every time you add a new operator under this scheme, you'd
also have to add overloaded versions which implement the distribution
functionality or do without. I have a feeling that a large number of
programmers would rather do without than write the extra code if it came
down to that choice.
How about this: if an operator is declared using one or more scalar
parameters, and there's no defined alternative using list parameters in
their places, implicit "distributing operators" are made available by the
compiler. So:
multi sub infix:+ ($x, $y) {...}
would imply something like the existence of
multi sub infix:+ (@x, $y) {return $_ + $y for @x;}
multi sub infix:+ ($x, @y) {return $x + $_ for @y;}
multi sub infix:+ (@x, @y) {...}
(Yes, I know I abused the syntax for "return" and "for" above, and that it
wouldn't do what you'd expect it to at first glance. Maybe it should?)
Can you coerce a scalar value into a list? I'd love to be able to say
something like "5 x $x" and have perl interpret it as "($x, $x, $x, $x,
$x)" - or, better yet, take "5 x rand()" and get (rand(), rand(), rand(),
rand(), rand())". Combine this with the above: to add five random numbers
to the first five elements of a list, you'd say "@x + 5 x rand()". The
only drawback to this is that the "x" operator has already been claimed as
a string operation.
And, upon review, I'd rather _not_ have the core syntax of perl rely on
unicode; so no using × (or whatever it's called in Unicode) for
this. Unicode's fine for supplemental material; but until such time as
unicode keyboards are more widespread, I don't want to be forced to use
it.
==
Is there anything else that <<+>> can do that the above can't?
=====
Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang
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