Operators that keep going and going...
Carissa
Rather I'd just like to throw out an idea (or two) that occurred to me today
somewhere between consciousness and the lack thereof while riding the
Skytrain.
Obviously the Perl6 community has accepted that it's possible to have
variants on operators for things like vectorization. I'm wondering if there
would be any desire, need or room for what I have so far thought of as
"persistent" (or "Energizer Bunny") operators. The closest analogy I can
think of is a spreadsheet formula, where when one cell is altered, any
calculations dependent on the data in that cell are recalculated.
The other thought that grew from these random neurons firing was whether or
not it would be possible to have operators that don't actually do anything
until the data they're dependent upon changes.
my $a = 0;
my $b = 9;
$a later= $b;
print "$a $b\n"
# 0 9
$b = 10;
print "$a $b\n"
# 10 10
Not sure if any of this would be even remotely useful, but this seems to be
as good a place as any to discuss wacky ideas that are of dubious value.
:-)
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Simon Cozens
> Obviously the Perl6 community has accepted that it's possible to have
> variants on operators for things like vectorization. I'm wondering if there
> would be any desire, need or room for what I have so far thought of as
> "persistent" (or "Energizer Bunny") operators.
Given that this is possible in Perl 5 (see Mark-Jason Dominus' forthcoming
book) I don't doubt it'll be easy to implement as a Perl 6 module with
user-defined operators.
--
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley
Luke Palmer
> The other thought that grew from these random neurons firing was whether or
> not it would be possible to have operators that don't actually do anything
> until the data they're dependent upon changes.
I should hope that would be possible, since it's possible in Perl 5!
See perldoc overload, in the section "Really symbolic calculator" (near
the end).
Luke
Matt Creenan
It just goes to show.. the perl community has already thought of
everything..
Larry Wall
: It just goes to show.. the perl community has already thought of
: everything..
Plus a few things beyond everything, if you're into surreal numbers.
Larry