tjreedy at udel.edu Fri Feb 6 19:42:50 CET 2004 <mathias.foehr
at mails.lu> wrote in message
news:184.108.40.206.0.20040206074906.02624b30 at www.mails.lu...
>I want to define new operators because mathematicians use
special > (eg circle plus (+), circle times (*), arrows ->)
since centuries. > It increases readability in this area and
people have got used to it. I am sympathetic to the desire and
for the same reason, but there are practical problems with
operator extensibility, which is why most computer languages
lack it. * Reuse existing operators (which Python does allow). *
Use overt functions and function calls. Operators are covert
functions with an alternate and somewhat ambiguous syntax for
function calls, which is why associativity and precedence rules
are needed to disambiguate. Short names are not all that bad,
and meaningful short name also have * Write custom additions to
some version of the interpreter. * Write a preprocessor that
does a partial parse to identify custom operators and the blocks