[PD] >, <, &&, || etc

[Martin Peach]

Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2009, Martin Peach wrote:
> 
>> etc...). For instance "greaterthan", "lessthan", "and", "or"; then 
>> some aliasing method could provide a means on those systems that can 
>> handle it to refer to them as '<' or whatever).
> 
> Perl uses gt,lt,ge,le,eq,ne as string comparisons whereas 
>  >,<,>=,<=,==,!= are used for numeric comparisons. Perl needs both by 
> design. You could reuse the same names.
> 
> The shell's [] (/usr/bin/test) also has -gt,-lt,-ge,-le,-eq,-ne, which 
> it uses for numeric comparisons, whereas it uses >,<,>=,<=,==,!= for 
> string comparisons. It also needs both by design.
> 

Sure, but bash is written in c and it can call its functions whatever it 
likes because they are built into the program. (It will also try to 
interpret your file name if it isn't alphanumeric)
Pd too has that freedom for its built-in functions but also has the 
ability to load a subset of all imaginable functions as externals. The 
limitation lies in the inability of the various operating systems to 
accept files named using arbitrary combinations of the available 
character set. All of the OSs that I know of can handle regular a-z type 
characters, so I suggest sticking to that range for the names of externals.
That's all.

Martin