PEP: Adding new operators for elementwise/objectwise operations
Huaiyu Zhu
hzhu at users.sourceforge.net
Fri Sep 29 19:46:38 EDT 2000
On 28 Sep 2000 11:49:34 GMT, Kevin Jacobs <jacobs at darwin.epbi.cwru.edu> wrote:
>Tom Loredo <loredo at spacenet.tn.cornell.edu> wrote:
>> I am developing a statistical computing framework in Python, and may use
>> "~" in this already-accepted fashion; I would hate to see its meaning
>> "overloaded" this way.
>
>If possible, I suggest that you bring your statistical computing framework
>ideas to the newsgroup, or at least the very motivated subset of us who are
>thinking about or working on the same thing. Personally, my dream is to
>have a Python based environment that will allow me to throw away SAS and
>S-Plus.
That would be very useful indeed. Count me in the subset, please.
I had attempted to implement some of that functionality in Matlab sometime
ago. Of course Python would be a much better tool.
>
>-Kevin
>
>PS: Just to put in my vote, I am strongly for having the ability to
> overload ~ operators. I too use BUGS, and while its a neat trick,
> its ~ operator is pure syntactic sugar. The PEP on new operators
> addresses readability and maintainability, which are major issues
> when an expression may have upwards of 10 infix operators (vs.
> BUGS which uses at most one ~ per statement).
>
Exactly. I've just viewed the BUGS pages, and indeed the ~ operator is
binary and can only appears once per statement. I think that using a
function or a method call would achieve similar effect. If we really need
this kind of syntactic sugar we could overload a binary operator like a^b.,
for example.
Huaiyu
--
Huaiyu Zhu hzhu at users.sourceforge.net
Matrix for Python Project http://MatPy.sourceforge.net
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