[q-lang-users] Improper tuples and user-defined operators

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

Albert Graef scripsit:

> "Improper" tuples are vital in symbolic computations, e.g., you will 
> often find them as a pattern in lambdas or "case" constructs. Redefining 
> this syntax to something else would thus not only raise orthogonality 
> concerns, it would also kill Q's reflective capabilities.

Ah, quite so.  I wasn't thinking about patterns, where improper tuples are
clearly useful.  It still leaves me with the problem of how to map them
to Scheme, however.  Probably as a list whose first element is "q-tuple".

Another point: it would be useful to me to have a qint.h function that
reports which symbols are operators and which are not, so that when the
Scheme user writes "(q-call over 1 2)" I can pass the symbol "(over)"
rather than "over" to the qmkapp() function.  Probably the Right Thing
is to return the precedence level, for the benefit of someone trying
to reconstruct the infix representation, or 0 if the symbol is not
an operator.

-- 
John Cowan  co...@cc...   http://ccil.org/~cowan
"The exception proves the rule."  Dimbulbs think: "Your counterexample proves
my theory."  Latin students think "'Probat' means 'tests': the exception puts
the rule to the proof."  But legal historians know it means "Evidence for an
exception is evidence of the existence of a rule in cases not excepted from."