Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!db
From: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Third public review of X3J11 C
Message-ID: <769@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 9 Sep 88 19:50:00 GMT
References: <8365@smoke.ARPA> <225800053@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <8374@smoke.ARPA> <8660@ihlpb.ATT.COM> <908@l.cc.purdue.edu> <340@quintus.UUCP>
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Reply-To: db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry)
Organization: Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
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In article <340@quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>As for infix notation, I wish someone would come up with a standard
>notation for sequence concatenation: I've seen "+" (which mathematical
>convention reserves for commutative operations), "&" (which looks like
>"and"), "*" (which makes the most sense, but is rare), and the theory
>papers tend to use a sign which is a bit like ^ and a bit like the
>intersection sign, and needless to say isn't in the ISO 8859/1 character set.
>In the absence of an agreed notation for such a fundamental operation,
>the use of functional notation has a lot to commend it.

I've seen "+" used for non-commutative operations, e.g. the definition
of Standard ML uses it for environment modification.  ML itself uses
"^" for strings and "@" for lists.  "@" sort of stands for "@ppend".

I've seen concatenation used too (in Icon?).  Of course, this clashes
with multiplication and function application.

But easily the best I've seen is Apple BASIC.  What could be clearer
than "a$(len(a$)+1) = b$" ?      :-O

 Dave Berry.		   A detailed economic analysis has revealed that
 db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk	   Britain's economy is changing from a manufacturing
 			   economy to an ass-licking economy.