HaloO,
Mark J. Reed wrote:
Sure. But that's different from saying "Ok, you can only define an /
operator for numberish things".
Well, if you adhere to the ring, field or whatever interface the
overloaded / sort of ends up being numberish anyway.
BTW, do we have a unary multiplikative inversion operator?
That is 1/ as prefix or **-1 as postfix? Perhaps .inv as method?
Do we have .neg for additive inversion?
Right. Which means there's no room for confusion with division,
'cause you can't divide strings! Ambiguity gone, problem solved, no
worries.
But without contextual information about the type of $x and $y an
expression $x/$y doesn't look particularly stringish to me.
BTW, operator overloading does not allow to change the precedence,
associativity and commutativity of the operator because these are
parser features.
That depends on the degree to which you can munge the parser, though.
And I got the impression that in Perl6 the parser is pretty mungible.
You just have to get to it early enough...
But you can't mix the two concepts! Consider
sub foo ($x)
{
return $x + $x * $x;
}
and imagine a type Blahh that behaves like Num but swaps precedence
of + and *:
my Blahh $y = 3;
say foo($y); # == 18
say foo(3); # == 12
How should the dispatcher know to dispatch to + first for $y?
Regards, TSa.
--
The Angel of Geometry and the Devil of Algebra fight for the soul
of any mathematical being. -- Attributed to Hermann Weyl
