unit-threaded v0.7.45 - now with more fluency

[Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa)]

On 05/08/2018 05:05 AM, Cym13 wrote:
> 
> I wouldn't say it's an abuse, the dot means exactly the same thing as 
> everywhere else in the language.

No, it really doesn't mean the same thing at all. Not when you look away 
from the unimportant implementation details and towards the big picture:

Normally, saying "x.y" denotes composition and membership: It means "y, 
which is a member of x". Saying "x.y" does NOT normally denote "The 
boundary between word 'x' and word 'y' in an english-grammared phrase".

But with things like "should.not.be", it's very much NOT a 
composition/membership relationship: A "be" is not really a 
member/property/component/etc of a "not", except in the sense that 
that's how the english-like DSL is internally implemented. A "should" is 
not really something that is composed of a "not", except in the sense 
that that's how the english-like DSL is internally implemented. (IF it 
even is implemented that way at all. I didn't look, so for all I know it 
might be opDispatch.)

I'm not saying that "should.not.be" OR "~" are abuses, I'm just saying 
whether or not they are, they're definitely both in the same category: 
Either they're both abuses or neither one is, because they both do the 
same thing: utilize use existing syntax for something other than the 
syntax's usual semantic meaning.

Formal "operator overloading" isn't the only way to alter (or arguably 
abuse) a language's normal semantics.