• Chad J (36/36) Oct 09 2012 From what I read on the "DIP19: Remove comma operator..." thread it

Chad J <chadjoan __spam.is.bad__gmail.com> writes:

 From what I read on the "DIP19: Remove comma operator..." thread it 
sounded like one of the difficult challenges for tuples is ambiguities 
created by indexing tuple elements that might also be random access 
ranges (arrays).  It gets especially nasty for single-element tuples.

Would it help if we used something /besides/ the normal index notation 
for this?

My immediate thoughts were something like:
(int,float) a;
a[[0]] = 1;
a[[1]] = 1.0;

But the idea of introducing the [[ and ]] tokens is probably not going 
to cut it.

Next I thought of this:
(int[]) a;
a.[0] = new int[10];
a[0] = 1;
assert(a.[0][0] == 1);

Thus a trailing dot in paths with brackets would indicate tuple 
dereferencing.

Another thought was to use a trailing   sign for this:
(int[]) a;
a [0] = new int[10];
a[0] = 1;
assert(a [0][0] == 1);

In fact, I wonder if the extra brackets are necessary at all:

(int[]) a;
a.0 = new int[10];
a[0] = 1;
assert(a.0[0] == 1);

(int[]) a;
a 0 = new int[10];
a[0] = 1;
assert(a 0[0] == 1);

Assuming I haven't missed some bad interactions with other syntax, then 
these notations should make tuple element access unambiguous.

Does this help?