Operators for everything (was Re: Operators for matrix)

[Cliff Crawford]

* Paul Prescod <paul at prescod.net> menulis:
| 
| I think name-based binary operators are actually pretty neat and can be
| used very Pythonically. IMO, they are the right compromise between
| terseness and legibility.

They sorta remind me of Smalltalk's keyword messages:

startTime addTime: delta                    (adds delta to startTime)
Date daysInMonth: #February forYear: 2000   (returns 28)

The parser can tell the keywords apart from the arguments because the
keywords all end in a colon.  They're also more readable than regular
method calls; for example, the second example in Python would look
something like this:

Date.daysInMonth("February", 2000)        or possibly
Date.daysInMonth("February", year=2000)

Guido's time machine must've gone really far back for this one;
Smalltalk dates from the 70's. :)


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cliff crawford    -><-    http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/cjc26/
                          Synaesthesia now!            icq 68165166