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Re: chained comparisons
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From:
demerphq
Date:
February 6, 2020 03:08
Subject:
Re: chained comparisons
Message ID:
CANgJU+WXip3oWdr4xrTC7YrDyUw6kVhuX6MfF9JD29Xxz_ZJ3w@mail.gmail.com
On Thu, 6 Feb 2020 at 04:05, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Feb 2020 at 18:14, demerphq <demerphq@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 5 Feb 2020 at 13:13, Smylers <smylers@stripey.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Zefram writes:
>>>
>>> > Branch zefram/cmpchain at <git://river.fysh.org/zefram/perl.git> may
>>> be
>>> > of some interest.
>>>
>>> Nice — that's definitely of interest! Thank you.
>>>
>>
>> Agreed a million times over.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> A few small doc suggestions. Re:
>>>
>>> A sequence of relational operators, such as
>>> S<C<"$a E<lt> $b E<lt>= $c">>, does not group in accordance with left
>>> or right associativity, which would produce the almost-useless result
>>> of using the truth-value result of one comparison as a comparand in
>>> another comparison. Instead the comparisons are I<chained>: each
>>> comparison is performed on the two arguments surrounding it, with each
>>> interior argument taking part in two comparisons, and the comparison
>>> results are implicitly ANDed.
>>>
>>> • I think for somebody first encountering this feature, it's more useful
>>> to state what it does, before what it doesn't.
>>>
>>> Specifically “You can chain operators like $a < $b <$c” is
>>> conceptually quite easy to understand, even for beginners.
>>>
>>> Thinking about what that would do were it not for chaining, involving
>>> associativity and the truth value of one comparison being used in
>>> another, isn't necessary in order to be able to use chaining, as well
>>> as being harder to think about.
>>>
>>
>> I think this is pretty reasonable feedback. If Zefram doesn't push a
>> doc-fix I will. I do think there is some use to explain the difference, but
>> after explaining the point. Someone used to the standard formulation might
>> think it is syntactic sugar for the expanded expression, but it is more
>> clever than that.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> • The word ‘comparand’ doesn't currently appear anywhere else in Perl's
>>> docs. It's a bit jargony, and may be offputting to people unfamiliar
>>> with the word. I haven't looked to see how comparand's are referred to
>>> elsewhere in the docs, but if there's a reasonably concise alternative
>>> which can be used, that may be better.
>>>
>>
>> I'm inclined to think that "dumbing it down"[1] will actually be
>> counter-productive and make the docs less clear not more. As the saying
>> goes "everything should be as simple as possible but not simpler".
>>
>
> I need to eat my words here. I redid the pod and dumbing it down did not
> end up being counter productive IMO.
>
> See bb8b81ab9014b5373724267eedb7425bed3ad2ee in zefram/cmpchain in
> main.git on github (I pushed it over from zeframs repo).
>
>
I meant perl5.git, sorry.
Yves
--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
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