domenic at domenicdenicola.com (2013-11-03T22:11:49.610Z)
I would love to have a way to write function calls infix. That may cover your use case as well. That is (strawman syntax):
arg1 #func arg2
would be syntactic sugar for
func(arg1, arg2)
Advantages: more versatile, less grawlixy. Problem: would make much more sense with multiple dispatch (dynamic dispatch over the arguments), but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for JavaScript.
I would love to have a way to write function calls infix. That may cover your use case as well. That is (strawman syntax): arg1 #func arg2 would be syntactic sugar for func(arg1, arg2) Advantages: more versatile, less grawlixy. Problem: would make much more sense with multiple dispatch (dynamic dispatch over the arguments), but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards for JavaScript. On 30 Oct 2013, at 4:01 , Tristan Zajonc <tristan at senseplatform.com> wrote: > Following up on the discussion about operator overloading, what are viable options for introducing novel infix operators or a class of extended/prefixed operators? > > For motivation, I along with some others have implemented a MATLAB/R like environment for JS. We've written a compile-to-js language that supports, among other things, operator overloading and prefixed operators, However we'd much prefer to follow ES6/7 and ideally avoid the need for a compile-to-js language entirely, at least in the future. Without going into the details, prefixed operators are useful for defining objectwise and elementwise operations on matrices, which is a core type in technical computing (see Julia, MATLAB, Mata, Python PEP 225). > > Assuming JS allowed prefixed operators: > > 1. What would be the most likely syntax? As a reference, Julia and Matlab use dots, a .+ b. Stata's Mata languages uses colons, a :+ b. PEP225 proposes tildle a ~+ b. R uses %infix% but this is widely viewed as a bad choice. The technical community would prefer dots. I know these prefixes all having meanings alone, but does .op introduce any ambiguity? Are there other lightweight options? > > 2. Is there a preferred class literal syntax? I believe the proposed value object syntax would be perfect if extended to classes as well. > > 3. Can this be done prior to macros? It may be my narrow matrix centered view, but I do not believe there's a compelling need for arbitrary infix operators in technical computing if it introduces additional difficulties. > > With ES6 and these operators I believe JS/NodeJS could easily take over the technical and statistical computing domains. > > Tristan -- Dr. Axel Rauschmayer axel at rauschma.de home: rauschma.de twitter: twitter.com/rauschma blog: 2ality.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/attachments/20131030/ff039cd1/attachment.html>