Re: choice of character for relational division

On Apr 1, 8:02 am, "Bruce C. Baker" <bcbake..._at_cox.net> wrote:
> "Marshall" <marshall.spi..._at_gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:1175417520.382456.123840_at_p15g2000hsd.googlegroups.com...
>
> > On Mar 31, 11:01 pm, "Bruce C. Baker" <bcbake..._at_cox.net> wrote:
>
> <snip Marshall's excellent responses to my posts>
>
> >> > I'll pick one of those. Okay, it's $.
>
> >> Your choice, of course,and FW( little )IW I'm cool with that.
>
> >> (I'm not trying to rain on your parade, Marshall; just pointing out that
> >> all the good operators have been taken! :-) )
>
> > Yeah. :-(
>
> Since it is relatively difficult to add a new infix operator to a computer
> language, my guess is that nowadays most programmers would implement
> relational division by defining a new function "reldiv" (again, I'm using
> "reldiv" just as an example; I'm not married to it! ;-) ):
>
> C := reldiv(A, B)

Maybe given the paucity of symbol characters, an alphabetic operator makes sense. Especially for something that's used so infrequently.

> But now that I've had a chance to think about your proposal, let me ask: In
> what context are you defining your operator? If it's only in a short
> discussion about relational algebra, a tutorial say, then maybe you'd want
> to keep the usual, familiar operators {+, -, *, /} and redefine them in
> terms of RA, whereas if you were designing and implementing your own
> programming language you could go with either the non-alpha symbol or the
> function call.
>
> BTW, you might also consider a multiple-character, non-alpha symbol like
> "//" or "%%".

Yeah, // seems somewhat attractive.

Marshall Received on Sun Apr 01 2007 - 18:37:25 CEST