[REBOL] Re: Tuples - Was Pair! thread
From: greggirwin:mindspring at: 7-Feb-2002 17:17
Hi Mark,
<< My point is that by conciously deciding to disable the pair! datatype to
be used with the greater than / less than comparator function, for the
reasons Holger outlined, which i disagree with and are an unneccesary and
artificial restriction in my opinion, then the pair! datatype is "lame" in
comparison with some of the other numeric datatypes, tuple!'s as I gave in
my example spring immediately to mind. >>
I can see things both ways. On one hand, we can say "we want all datatypes
to support all operations", OTOH that may not be the best design choice and,
if doing so severely impacted performance for the most common usage, or
added bugs, we'd probably complain about that. :)
I think it's RT's job, maybe their hardest one, *not* to give us everything
we ask for. If they did, REBOL would become a language designed by committee
and would suffer greatly for it, IMO. That's one of the reasons I'm
*opposed* to them making it open source at this time. Maybe someday, when
the language has matured, it would work but I'm not even sure about that.
I'm a big believer in the power of conceptual integrity and that's hard to
maintain in a large group, or even a small one. :)
--Gregg
