Re: augmented operators (was: implicit parameters)

["Nick Trout" <nick@...>]

Nick Trout wrote:
>
> Have you though about adding augmented operators eg. +=, -= etc in Sol?
>>One may think that it could be faster to execute.  But it isn't
if you want the semantic of "a += b" is "a = a + b" (with "a"
evaluated only once).  There are two types of storage in Lua/Sol:
tables and locals.  For tables you have to perform the two
accesses to the table (read and write) because of possible tag-
methods (get/settable).  Nothing to optimize here.  Locals could
be optimized with a special instruction but again you have to
consider tag methods for "+" and that reduces the possible
optimization to <numlocvar>+=<num> [1].
One could try to make += and co special operators (ie "incr_by",
"mul_by", ...) with appropriate tag methods.  But that requires
references to objects and these only exist for tables, not for
locals.  (Btw, the same problem exists for "++" and "--".)
Beside that it would make the language more complicated.
>>Result: you would only get some very expensive syntactic sugar ;)

I hadnt really though about the tag methods complication. From your
description of the implementation I agree it would be quite complicated for
little gain. I had thought it might be faster, but not necessary so it
seems.

Cheers,
Nick.