binary selectors ambiguity and space

Dan Ingalls Dan at SqueakLand.org
Sat May 13 00:36:31 UTC 2006


Well, the *idea* was that you should not need spaces, and St-76, borrowing from APL, had a different character for the semantically different high-minus sign for negative literals, so this was not a problem.  High-minus bit the dust with the ascii changes of St80 thus necessitating a space before negative literals that follow binary messages.

>Sorry cannot find the thread which started this discussion,
>but it seems i cannot have some binary selector with minus sign last.
>
>For example, i can compile
>    Compiler evaluate: 'nil -+ nil'
>Or
>    Compiler evaluate: 'nil -/+ nil'
>
>But i cannot compile
>    Compiler evaluate: 'nil +- nil'
>nor
>    Compiler evaluate: 'nil +/- nil'
>
>I understand that eventually some expressions might be ambiguous like
> 1+-2 that can be interpreted as (1) + (-2) or (1) +- (2)
>But such ambiguity could raise an error or warning,
>and in most case, spaces will help disambiguating:
> 1+-   2 would be (1) +- (2)
> 1+   -2 would be (1) + (-2)

Agreed.

>Funny, in current 3.9 spaces are ignored:
>i have '1 +-   2' interpreted as (1) + (-2)
>
>I cannot even write 1 +-+ 2, though no ambiguity lie there...

Agreed.

>I guess all this is very squeak specific

I don't know, but it ought to be fixed.

	- Dan



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