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Re: [PATCH 2/2] compare function


From: Jouke Witteveen
Subject: Re: [PATCH 2/2] compare function
Date: Tue, 9 Jun 2020 11:45:03 +0200

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 10:53 AM Edward Welbourne <edward.welbourne@qt.io> wrote:
>
> Jouke Witteveen (8 June 2020 22:20)
> > It differs from his original proposal in that it behaves differently
> > when given 4 or 5 arguments. In short, it's signature is
> >
> >  $(compare lhs,rhs,less-than[,greater-or-equal])
> >  $(compare lhs,rhs,less-than,equal,greater-than)
> >
> > Documentation and a proper commit message is still missing, but this
> > proof-of-concept shows that it is in fact pretty simple to implement.
>
> Simplicity of implementation was not far from my thoughts when I
> proposed it; it is also easy to understand ;^>
>
> I note that your implementation only supports numeric lhs and rhs.
> Might it be worth falling back, if either of them isn't numeric, to
> doing a strcmp() comparison instead ?  Possibly after stripping leading
> space from each.  There is value in lexical comparison, too, after all.

I am not sure it is wise to mix integer and string contexts. Having a
$(compare) function that deals exclusively with integer context has
some appeal to me.

> I am not convinced it is good to have $5 default to $4, which is what
> you've done in effect.  IIRC, most of make's existing functions treat
> missing argument as empty; if my memory is correct, it would then be
> more consistent to have
>
>   $(compare $lhs,$rhs,$less[,$same[,$more]])
>
> with each of $same and $more empty if omitted.  (I make $less
> non-optional because it's perverse to do a comparison and return false
> regardless; but it could be optional, "for symmetry", if you like;
> albeit that might lead to a temptation to make it default to a non-empty
> string, so that $(compare $lhs,$rhs) serves as $lhs < $rhs as a
> conditional; but this would violate the very symmetry that motivated
> making $less optional.)

$(if) also has a minimum of two arguments, so let's not make $less optional.
Having $5 default to $4 was entirely deliberate. It means that the
semantics of the four-argument version mimics $(if) in the sense that
the expression evaluates to either the third or the fourth argument.
If you want the behavior you describe, you could simply add a ','
after the fourth argument, i.e. specify an empty fifth argument.
Because this is so short, I think it is far more elegant than wrapping
everything in an $(if).

> As I noted before, the cases where two branches want the same verbose
> value can readily enough be handled by using $(if ...) on a condition
> using $(compare ...) with two of its output values empty and the other
> some non-empty string (due to Lisp influence, I'd use t), or vice versa;
> or you could use $(let ...) to put the repeated value in a local
> variable that you use in both intended branches, when this more verbose
> form proves more readable (as it sometimes shall).

$(let) won't deal with side effects properly though. In effect, let
variables are simply expanded.

> > Additionally, I feel that the interface is clean. In that way, it
> > differs from the various proposals for integer operations. After
> > thinking about them some more, I came to dislike all current proposals
> > because of the unintuitive behavior of subtraction and division.
>
> I think this depends a lot on your intuitions, which can be trained.  I
> find $(math $op, $a $b ... $z) = $a $op $b $op ... $op $z to be
> entirely intuitive, but then I've been exposed to many ways of doing
> algebra and perpetrated some related to this.  (I would describe this as
> a "bulk action", for reference; see
>   http://www.chaos.org.uk/~eddy/maths/found/bulk.xhtml
> for a more formal treatment of the associative (i.e. + and * but not -
> and /) case.  It generalises sum and product.  I think some folk call
> these monads.  However, the fact that I write stuff like that may fairly
> be considered grounds for doubting my intuitions are shared by many
> others.)

Indeed, the proposals for sum and product make sense, but those for
subtraction and division cannot be made to work, since the operations
are not associative. It is not the syntax that bothers me, but the
semantics. As stated a few times now,

  $(math -,3)

could evaluate to '3' (in line with your expansion rule above) or to
'-3' (in line with intuition and because we would need a way to do
unary negation anyway). The design tries to achieve too many things at
once and will always fail to accomplish some of them.

> > We should only support integer mathematics, so division is always
> > going to be integer division, which suggests that we need a modulus
> > operator as well. Moreover, 1/$x will not be supported, so we can't
> > implement the same behavior for $(math -,$x) as for $(math
> > /,$x). While verbose, the only clean way I can think of is simply
> > $(add $x,$y), $(subtract $x,$y), etc. All supporting precisely two
> > arguments. Multi argument versions can be defined like
> >
> >  sum = $(let first rest,$1, \
> >       $(if $(rest),$(add $(first),$(call sum,$(rest))), \
> >                    $(first)))
>
> which is surely somewhat expensive, since we're bouncing back and forth
> between the make "interpreter" and the $(add ...) function over and over
> again, instead of just taking one trip via $(math ...).  Not that performance
> is likely to be a deal-breaker, here.

I am not interested in broadening the reach of make, only in picking
some low hanging fruit that can make it more ergonomic for its current
use cases. The examples of desirable math that have been posted to
this list were all rather trivial. If you want to do computer algebra,
there are better languages than make.

Regards,
- Jouke



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