OpenEuphoria

Re: length() of an atom

• Posted by petelomax Sep 23, 2010
• 1641 views

That really didn't make a whole lot of sense to me!

Anyway, as soon as this thread reappeared, I had two thoughts:

To keep things in order, length(atom) should return {}.

Well, it made me chuckle anyway, of course I'm joking. However, the other solution is to code (the equivalent of)

function length(object x, object default_result={}) 
  if sequence(x) then 
    return eu:length(x) 
  elsif atom(default_result) then 
    return default_result 
  else 
    crash_and_burn() 
  end if 
end function 

Then of course you can simply code length(5,1) to get your 1 rather than crash, and no legacy code whatsoever will be affected at all (and I hope not even performancewise), nor will it affect anyone that disagrees with changing length().

Regards, Pete