From 648416730184351085 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f78e5,9a6b7da9ba54eaea X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-07-06 04:43:49 PST Path: gmd.de!newsserver.jvnc.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uwm.edu!linac!att!att!allegra!alice!ark From: ark@alice.att.com (Andrew Koenig) Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: C++ Language Extensions Message-ID: <25939@alice.att.com> Date: 6 Jul 93 10:54:43 GMT Article-I.D.: alice.25939 References: <212tii$5nb@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <215t2r$sv4@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <25936@alice.att.com> Reply-To: ark@alice.UUCP () Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ Lines: 24 In article schouten@sp95.csrd.uiuc.edu writes: > I don't see how this is relevant. All we (proponents of > an exponentiation operator) are asking for is a character or two > to be defined as a right-associative high priority operator. Forget > about semantics. No -- that's what *you* (as an individual) are asking, presumably along with some other people. But I am sure that other people want, at the very least, an operator with the property that evaluating x~2 (or whatever the operator is) is no slower and no less accurate than evaluating x*x. I suspect that people who do serious numerical work will accept no less. Then there is the problem of what character to use for the operator. I picked ~ for this example, but that's really inappropriate because it's not among the characters guaranteed to be present in every country (remember: this is an international standard we're working on). Indeed, if I remember the discussions properly (I'm not in the extensions working group), there is no appropriate character: $ is also a national character and ^ is already defined with the wrong precedence. -- --Andrew Koenig ark@research.att.com