[Python-Dev] Re: ANN: PEP 335: Overloadable Boolean Operators

[Tim Hochberg]

Greg Ewing wrote:

[SNIP]

Just a couple of quick comments on the motivation:


> Motivation
> ==========
> 
> There are many applications in which it is natural to provide custom
> meanings for Python operators, and in some of these, having boolean
> operators excluded from those able to be customised can be
> inconvenient.  Examples include:
> 
> 1. Numeric/Numarray, in which almost all the operators are defined on
>    arrays so as to perform the appropriate operation between
>    corresponding elements, and return an array of the results.  For
>    consistency, one would expect a boolean operation between two
>    arrays to return an array of booleans, but this is not currently
>    possible.
> 
>    There is a precedent for an extension of this kind: comparison
>    operators were originally restricted to returning boolean results,
>    and rich comparisons were added so that comparisons of Numeric
>    arrays could return arrays of booleans.

For Numeric/Numarray, I think and1/or1 would be unnecessary. If that 
were true in general it would simplify the proposal signifigantly: 
and2/or2 could be renamed to and/or and and1/or1 could be dropped.


> 2. A symbolic algebra system, in which a Python expression is
>    evaluated in an environment which results in it constructing a tree
>    of objects corresponding to the structure of the expression.
> 
> 3. A relational database interface, in which a Python expression is
>    used to construct an SQL query.

I would be interested in seeing use cases for either or both of these 
last two examples that show how and1/or1 are useful.



Regards,

-tim