Re: [q-lang-users] Q 7.2 RC1 Issue 2: Notation

[Rob H. <hub...@gm...>]

On 19/06/06, Albert Graef <Dr....@t-...> wrote:
> John Cowan wrote:
> > I'm not happy with "over" as the notation for rational numbers.
> > In particular, "1 over 5+2 over 3" looks totally wrong for 1/5 + 2/3;
> > the visual grouping is hopelessly broken.  I realize that we can't use
> > "/" for this purpose, but can't we use another symbol operator?

> So I'm afraid that the only 7 bit ASCII punctuation symbol that's left
> is "%" (incidentally, this is also what Haskell uses for the same
> purpose). It's been a while since this has been used as a comment
> character, so I'd say it's safe to reuse it now. Then you could type
> your example as "1%5 + 2%3". Acceptable?

> Rob, what's your take on this? Do you prefer "over" or "%"? After all
> it's your module. ;-)

Please don't use '%' for division.
I know that Q is not similar to 'C', but '%' really looks like
remainder/modulus to me.

If you really need a symbol, can't a compound symbol be used? Perhaps
'//', although that would then mean that '/' and '//' would be the
"wrong way around" compared to Python.

What about some other combination along the lines of '/.', '/^', '/!', ...?

I do agree that the formatting would look far better with a symbol
than with (over).

Rob.