Operators for everything (was Re: Operators for matrix)

[Michael Hudson]

W.Whiten at mailbox.uq.edu.au (Bill Whiten) writes:

> In article <3977AF5E.552F4F42 at my.signature>, Greg Ewing <see at my.signature>
> wrote:
> > Python with its overloadable operators can be thought of
> > as a meta-language for creating domain-specific languages.
> > But the number of operators is too restricted for it to
> > be really good in this role. Operator overloading feels like
> > something tacked on as an afterthought rather than a
> > serious feature. I don't think it's unreasonable
> > to consider whether this situation could be improved.
> 
> I would prefer the normal oprerators plus an escape character followed by
> additional characters to define new operators eg @+ @div etc.

I quite like this idea (unlike most of the others that have been
mentioned...); it reminds me of Haskell.

The semantics would be:

a @<id> b === <id>(a,b)

for any valid identifier <id>.

There are still precedence issues, but I think they can be ignored
(make everything of this from the same (low) precedence & left
asssociative).

Cheers,
M.

-- 
3. Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
  -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html