List replication operator

Fri May 25 11:40:34 EDT 2018

On 25/05/2018 16:27, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, May 25, 2018 at 10:58 PM, bartc <bc at freeuk.com> wrote:
>> I'm in general not in favour of piling in special symbols into a language
>> just to solve some obscure or rare problem.
>>>> As I went on to demonstrate, function-like syntax (or even actual functions)
>> could do that job better, by describing what the operation does and not
>> leaving people scratching their heads so much when they encounter that
>> funny-looking operator hidden in 20,000 lines of code.
>>>> As for '@', if a variable name can come before it /and/ after it, and either
>> or both can be dotted, wouldn't that cause it to be highlighted as an email
>> address in many circumstances? Such as in code posted here.
>>>> (OK, let's try it and see what happens. My Thunderbird doesn't do previews
>> so I will have to post it first:
>>>> abc at def
>> abc at def.ghi)
>>>> I would find that rather annoying.
>>>> You're way WAY too late to debate the matrix multiplication operator.

/The/ matrix multiplication operator?
In which language? And what was wrong with "*"?
(I've implemented matrix multiply in a language (although for 
specialised matrix types), and I used the same "*" symbol as was used to 
multiply anything else.)
Anyway this is not matrix multiplication, but replication, and using '@' 
seems more a consequence of there not being any better ones available as 
they are already used for other things.
-- 
bartc