[m-dev.] Re: [m-rev.] field syntax (was: smart recompilation)

[Fergus Henderson]

On 06-Jul-2001, Simon Taylor <stayl at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 06-Jul-2001, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > On 06-Jul-2001, Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > > So let me ask you to clarify a few examples:
> > > 
> > > If I have a 2-space position type with x and y fields, are r and theta
> > > "field-like"?  And what if my application uses r and theta so often I decide
> > > to switch to a polar representation?
> > > 
> > > Is the length of a string "field-like"?  It may or may not be explicitly
> > > stored.  Is an individual character in the string "field-like?"  How about a
> > > substring? 
> > 
> > I'd answer "yes" to all of the above.
> > 
> > One criterion which helps to distinguish between things which are field-like
> > and things which are not is that for field-like things, it almost always
> > makes sense to talk about setting the field, and setting a field of an
> > object to a given value results in a single new object.
> > That is definitely true for all of the above, but not true for `toupper'.
> 
> How is the length of a string settable?

It's not.  I was wrong about that one.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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