sequence multiplied by -1

[John Nagle]

On 9/26/2010 1:16 AM, Paul Rubin wrote:
> Steven D'Aprano<steve at REMOVE-THIS-cybersource.com.au>  writes:
>> There's nothing obscure or unintuitive about "spam"*3 = "spamspamspam",
> Why would it not be ["spam","spam","spam"] or even "ssspppaaammm"?
> Should "spam"*2.5 be "spamspamsp"?
> Should "spam"-"a" be "spm"?  What about "spamspam"-"a"?
> And what about "spam"/2?  "sp" be an ok first guess, but "sa" might
> make more sense (it means (1,2,3,...)/2 would be (1,3,5...)).
>
> I say it's all hokey from the get-go ;-).

    I tend to agree.  "+" as concatenation is at least associative.
Trying to concatenate a string with an integer raises an exception,
so that's not going to generate unexpected values.

    "*" as repetition, on the other hand, is a mixed-mode operation.
That's why this is troublesome.  Where the type spaces are isolated,
overloading isn't so risky.

    We should have something like "repeat" or "dup" as
a string method rather than an overloading of the "*" operator.
Strings already have a range of methods which perform basic
operations on the string and return a new string, so
that's consistent.

    "xyz".dup(3)

is clear enough.

    And allowing

	"xyz"*-3

was just lame.  What reasonable use case does that have?

				John Nagle