On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:

> Axel Rauschmayer wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> # is pure grawlix. It's also one of the few ASCII punctuators left, so
> wanted otherwise.
>
>
>  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.
>>
>
> The operators stuff I've been developing uses a variant of multimethod
> dispatch.
>
> Operators cannot be usable if spelled #add, so we must support all the
> built-in ones I've talked about (see http://www.slideshare.net/**
> BrendanEich/js-resp <http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/js-resp>).
> Whether we need element-wise operators is really what this thread is about
> (I think, based on Tristan's spinout). Arbitrary infix named operators IMHO
> want another thread, and also later. Design means leaving things out (N.
> Wirth).
>
>
Both operators and element-wise operators really benefit from Brendan's
multiple dispatch proposal.  Julia has used this approach to great effect.
 I'm not opposed to it, but I don't believe there's a compelling need for
arbitrary infix operators in the technical computing domain.  The
motivation for elementwise operators is to allow for a clean matrix API
that would make JS best-of-bread for numerical computing.  A secondary
benefit is that it could provide a cow path towards high performance BLAS
backed matrix operations making it to the browser sometime far in the
future. Any suitably lightweight syntax would work, although +: has some
things to recommend it.

Tristan
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On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:

> The operators stuff I've been developing uses a variant of multimethod
> dispatch.
>
> Operators cannot be usable if spelled #add, so we must support all the
> built-in ones I've talked about (see http://www.slideshare.net/BrendanEich/js-resp).
> Whether we need element-wise operators is really what this thread is about
> (I think, based on Tristan's spinout). Arbitrary infix named operators IMHO
> want another thread, and also later. Design means leaving things out (N.
> Wirth).

Both operators and element-wise operators really benefit from Brendan's
multiple dispatch proposal.  Julia has used this approach to great effect.
 I'm not opposed to it, but I don't believe there's a compelling need for
arbitrary infix operators in the technical computing domain.  The
motivation for elementwise operators is to allow for a clean matrix API
that would make JS best-of-bread for numerical computing.  A secondary
benefit is that it could provide a cow path towards high performance BLAS
backed matrix operations making it to the browser sometime far in the
future. Any suitably lightweight syntax would work, although +: has some
things to recommend it.