Larry Wall wrote:
On Sat, Mar 26, 2005 at 02:37:24PM -0600, Rod Adams wrote:
: How can you have a level independent position?
By not confusing positions with numbers. They're just pointers into
a particular string.
I'm not the Unicode guru but my understanding is that all composition
sequences are finite and stateless with respect to everything before
and after them in the string. Which brings me to the question if these
positions are defined like positions in Emacs as lying *between* the
chars? Then the set of positions of a higher level is a subset of the
positions of lower levels.
With defining position as between chars many operations on strings are
downwards compatible between levels, e.g. splitting. If one determines
e.g. an insert position on a higher level there's no problem in letting
the actual insertion beeing handled by a lower level. With fractional
positions on higher levels some degree of upward or tunneling
compatibility can be achieved.
BTW, will bidirectionality be supported? Does it make sense to reflect
it in the StrPos type such that $pos_start < $pos_end means a non-empty
left to right string, $pos_start > $pos_end is a non-empty right to left
string and $pos_start == $pos_end delimit an empty (sub)string? As a
natural consequence the sign indicates direction with negative length
beeing right to left. And that leads to two times two types of iterators:
left to right, right to left, start to end and end to start.
All the above leads me to rant about an array like type. Please forgive
me if the following is not proper Perl6. My point is to illustrate how
I imagine the future communication between implementor and user of such
a class. Actually some POD support for extracting the type information
into the documentation would be great, too!
And yes, the :analyse should be made lazy. The distinction between the
first and second index method could be even more specific by using
type 'Index ^ List of Str where { $_.elems == 1 }' to convey the
information that indexing with a list of one element doesn't result
in a List of Str but a plain Str. OTOH this will incur a performance
penalty and violate the intuitive notion "list in, list out".
class StrPosArray does Array where { ::Index does StrPos }
{
has Str $:data;
has StrPos @:pos;
multi method postcircumfix:<[ ]>
(: Index $i ) returns Str {...}
multi method postcircumfix:<[ ]>
(: List of Index $i ) returns List of Str {...}
multi method postcircumfix:<[ ]>
(: Range of Index $i ) returns List of Str {...}
multi method postcircumfix:<[ ]>
(: Int $i ) returns Str {...}
# more stuff here for push, pop, shift etc.
method infix:<=> (: Str $rhs ) returns ::?CLASS
{
$:data = $rhs;
:analyse;
}
method :analyse ()
{
# scan $:data for all between char positions
# and store them into @:pos
}
}
Question:
does the compiler go over this source in multiple passes
such that the declaration of :analyse is known before its
usage in infix:<=>?
--
TSa (Thomas Sandlaß)
