Language ideas

[Dar Scott]

On May 20, 2005, at 1:15 PM, Robert Brenstein wrote:

>
>>  > if a is (b or c) then
>> Or if a = (b or c)
>
> I find it ambiguous because it will interfere with normal 'or' clauses.

I agree.  I was so busy bragging about how I had done that before that 
I neglected to say that.  It was not ambiguous in that ancient case 
because = was not defined on booleans.

>
>>  > put a into b and c
>> Or put a into b,c This is something that would be good.
>
> Akin to what can be done in C :) It could be a handy shortcut 
> ocassionally but using 'and' here bother me since 'and' normally 
> implies logical operation. May using comma would be better if there is 
> a convincing justification to add it.

My first guess of the meanings of the two are not the same.

I had guessed that
    put a into b and c
would be the same as
    put a into b
    put a into c

I had guessed that
   put a into b, c
would be the same as
   put item 1 of a into b
   put item 2 to -1 of a into c

In both cases 'a' would be evaluated one time.

We already find cases where 'and' used in a syntactic sense that is not 
the operator 'and' and I agree--it is awkward.  However, comma is the 
same way.  One has to be careful in passing comma'd values as 
parameters.
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