Re: choice of character for relational division

"Marshall" <marshall.spight_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)

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 "%%".

>
> Marshall
>
Received on Sun Apr 01 2007 - 10:02:46 CDT