Is [] mandatory for array operations?

[Johan Granberg]

Robert Jacques wrote:

> On Thu, 06 May 2010 14:40:17 -0400, bearophile <bearophileHUGS at lycos.com>
> wrote:
>> Kagamin:
>>> Since sin's result is not an array,<
>>
>> I am not sure, but I presume here Don was talking about a dispatch of
>> the sin to all items of an array, so its result is another (new or
>> mutated in place) array.
>>
>> Bye,
>> bearophile
>>
> 
> That presumes a transform of the form: sin(y[]) => map!sin(y). However,
> this creates unnecessary temporaries which are one of the main things
> array ops is supposed to avoid. So this is a vote against sin(y[])[].

There is another use for array ops as well, that is to create a nice syntax
for doing the same operation over all elements in an array. Matlab is doing
this in a very nice way and it is far from all uses that requiers optimal
speed. 

I personaly is very much in favour of allowing this transformations.
Sometimes they make code much shorter to write.

> Also, if sin(y[]) returned a lazy/eager array then auto t = sin(y[]);
> should be valid, but auto t = x[] + y[] is not currently valid. So this is
> a vote against sin(y[])[].
> 
> As a related note, what do people think of array ops for generic ranges
> (assuming they support length, etc)?

Sounds nice