OpenEuphoria

Re: RFC: Breaking existing Euphoria functionality

• Posted by Derek Parnell <ddparnell at bigpond.com> Feb 22, 2007
• 782 views

Michael J. Sabal wrote:
> 
> Has anybody written a statement like this:
> 
> result = ({'a','b','c'} = {'a','b','f'})
> 
> and expected result to look like this:
> 
> ? result
> {1,1,0}?
> 
> Is there any code in the archives or recent user contributions (say less than
> 3 years old) that takes advantage of this functionality?
> 
> I would like to change binary_ops() in be_runtime.c so that the result of
> comparing two sequences with an operator (=,<,>,<=,>=,!=) returns a single
> boolean rather than a sequence of booleans.  The benefit to this change 
> would allow sequences to be compared in an if or while statement without
> requiring compare or equal.  The drawback is breaking existing functionality.
> I expect the performance hit to be negligible.

I don't see the need to do this though. The sequence operations are not a bad
thing to have, generally speaking. My issue is that conditional statements should
not be doing a sequence operation but a comparision operation instead. Thus ...

  if XYZ < ABC then 

should be viewed as a comparision and not a sequence operation.

However ...

   DEF = (XYZ < ABC)

should be a sequence operation (then an assignment) because it is not in the
context of a conditional statement ('if', 'while' ...)

-- 
Derek Parnell
Melbourne, Australia
Skype name: derek.j.parnell