Re: Definable operators

apardon@rc4.vub.ac.be (Antoon Pardon) writes:
> Is it the responsibility of the language to enforce "+" is only used
> in appropiate ways or for that matter "insert"?


I think some kind of "enforcement" could be had by adding
constraints/assertions/invariants/younameit. The notion of "protocol"
which specifies about an object when some method can be called, could
be used or extended for that. One could add constraints (as part of
the language rather than merely comments) saying that all
redefinitions of function (or operator) toto should follow some
rules. This way you could enforce things like associativity. In a more
general setting, it simply allows to enforce a semantic similarity
between the different variants of some operation.


I believe this is exactly what Eiffel tries to do with its postconditions.




                Stefan
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