[Python-ideas] Infix functions

[Haoyi Li]

> As I said in the initial message, this is exactly what the Numeric guys
suggested in the PEP back in the 2.1 days

Ah I missed that point, sorry for the noise


On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Feb 21, 2014, at 21:18, Haoyi Li <haoyi.sg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I like infix functions, but am no fan of the backtick syntax. Of all the
> things that backticks mean to people: quotes, finger-quotes, code-snippets,
> interpolate, whatever, "make me infix" is not one of them. Hard to type on
> a keyboard is almost a non-reason in comparison. I know Haskell does it,
> but... not that many people have used Haskell.
>
> Another idea would be to go the Scala path and turn *methods* into infix
> operators, by letting you call *point_a.add(point_b)* as *point_a add
> point_b* or *point_a @add point_b *or some other special sigil. This is
> semantically different from using infix functions because your infix
> operators now do not clutter up your namespace, since they would be
> properties of the LHS object. Not sure if it's "Pythonic", whatever that
> means, but it's a neat idea that has found a lot of success in the Scala
> world and I think is superior to the various other mechanisms for
> infix-functions/operator-overloading that I see in Python/Ruby/C#/F#/etc.
>
>
> As I said in the initial message, this is exactly what the Numeric guys
> suggested in the PEP back in the 2.1 days: "a @foo b" resolves to something
> like "a.__foo__(b)". They also wanted it to fall back to b.__rfoo__(a)".
>
> By "something like" I do not mean "exactly". The original proposal relied
> on the fact that quoted method names, with non-identifier symbols in them,
> would replace double underscore names, so you'd have "@foo" and "r at foo"
> (and today's __add__ would be "+").
>
> Anyway, I think functions make more sense than methods here, but I already
> explained why and don't want to repeat it.
>
>
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