From 4341196479284584805 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: f78e5,9a6b7da9ba54eaea X-Google-Attributes: gidf78e5,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 1993-07-06 09:03:40 PST Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Path: gmd.de!xlink.net!howland.reston.ans.net!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!csrd.uiuc.edu!sp95.csrd.uiuc.edu!schouten From: schouten@sp95.csrd.uiuc.edu (Dale Schouten) Subject: Re: C++ Language Extensions In-Reply-To: ark@alice.att.com's message of 6 Jul 93 10:54:43 GMT Message-ID: Sender: news@csrd.uiuc.edu Reply-To: schouten@sp95.csrd.uiuc.edu Organization: Center for Supercomputing R & D References: <212tii$5nb@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <215t2r$sv4@senator-bedfellow.MIT.EDU> <25936@alice.att.com> <25939@alice.att.com> Date: 06 Jul 1993 15:54:21 GMT Lines: 38 In article <25939@alice.att.com> ark@alice.att.com (Andrew Koenig) 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. I was being presumptuous for the sake of simplicity. > 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. Yet you're asking them to accept much less. You're chasing shadows here. As I and others have pointed out, this is irrelevant becase; 1) All these numerical restrictions equally whether you're talking about an operator or a `pow' function and 2) you can make exactly the same arguments about * w.r.t. +. Your points just don't make sense in this context. >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. Oh come on! Surely you aren't seriously suggesting that it's not feasible because we've already used up all the characters? There are lots of possibilities. Dale Schouten schouten@uiuc.edu