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[REBOL] Re: x: :y question

From: joel:neely:fedex at: 4-Feb-2003 8:32

Hi, Romano, This way lies madness! ;-) Romano Paolo Tenca wrote:
> You can use the only unused op ! > > !=: either x < 0 [:+][:-] > a: a != 1 > > or re-use another op. >
... thus making the code even harder to read/understand for anyone who must work with it (including the original author, once it is no longer fresh on the mind). Extending a language with new concepts/words is one thing, but changing the meanings of concepts/words already existing in the language is quite another (cf. "glory" in _Alice_in_Wonderland_). These statements especially apply here, as the distance between the redefinition and the use of the redefined word may be arbitrarily large (in either time or lexically within the source code), thus making detection of the cause of later unpleasant surprises increasingly difficult. Just my $0.02 ... -jn-