Superators Add New Operators to Ruby 27

Posted by Jay Phillips Thu, 30 Aug 2007 02:51:00 GMT

This one’s for the fellow DSL mavens. I’m releasing now a new library I’ve developed that adds new operators to Ruby. Install the superators gem and run the following code in irb:

require 'rubygems'
require 'superators'

class Array
  superator "<---" do |operand|
    self << operand.reverse
  end
end

["jay"] <--- "spillihp"

Dear demagogues of domain specificity! Yes, this actually works. Now, how about this cutie:

require 'rubygems'
require 'superators'

class String
  superator "++" do |operand|
    upcase + operand.upcase
  end
  superator "-~+~-" do |operand|
    puts "Using pretty superators"
    self + operand
  end
end

p "Tangy" ++ "Erlangy"
p "Super" -~+~- "ators"

Superators are a superset of Ruby operators. And they’re pretty super too.

To elaborate more, they work by exploiting the way Ruby parses binary and unary operators. For example, the code

foo ++- bar

is equivalent to

foo.+(bar.-@().+@())

and the Superators library keeps track of the unary operators called on the operand in their appropriate order. A valid Superator’s format is simple: take (almost) any Ruby binary operator and tail on an indefinite number of unary operators after it.

These are the Ruby binary operators you can use: ** * / % + - << >> & | ^ <=> >= <= < > === == =~

And here are the unary operators: - ~ +

The only operators you can’t use are the logical ones (e.g. &&, ||, !, and, or, not, etc.) Ruby offers no way of overloading these.

I’m releasing this into the wild to hopefully see what mischief it stirs. But take heed! Superators are second-class citizens still and are victims of vicious discrimination in certain circumstances. In the current implementation the second operand is extend()ed with a Ruby module (unobtrusively setting a flag for later inspection), therefore a Superator can only have a second operand capable of possessing its own eigenclass. Superators will not work with second operands such as true, false, nil, Symbols or Fixnums yet. I’m working on a branch that could fix this if my mad scientist lab experiments bear fruit (or a resentful monster whom I chase to the Arctic Circle after he destroys those I love). Stay tuned.

Despite this limitation, Superators can still be used effectively! Use it when you expect the second operand to be an Array, String, Hash, Range, Regexp, Class, or whatever.

I should note that I strongly frown upon any use of Superators outside of the DSL space. Don’t use it in your company’s Rails app controllers. Use it in your tenderly crafted Ruby DSLs where they make sense.

Enjoy, comrades.

Update: There seems to be some confusion that Superators are a C extension that modify Ruby’s internals. A valid Superator is actually just valid Ruby—something we’ve had at our disposal this whole time!

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Comments

Leave a response

  1. Aleks Clark about 1 hour later:

    Excellent. Job security and spiffy DSL construction in one neat package.

    What I did with it:

    require 'rubygems'
require 'superators'
class Array
  superator "<~" do |operand|
    self.concat(operand)
    self.sort!
  end
end

["aleks", "bob", "monkey", "zebra"] <~ ["joseph", "xylophone"]
  2. Greg Houston about 14 hours later:

    yes, I can now have a ninja sword operation:

    zato =|===- boss

  3. nick about 17 hours later:

    Does code readability or maintainability mean anything to you? The first commenter had it right, “Job Security”.

  4. Jay Phillips about 17 hours later:

    Nick, I make my career in making Ruby code maintainable and readable through DSLs. You’d think that speaks a little about my stance there. You’ll not see Superators in Adhearsion—they’re a fun thing I cranked out in a weekend to prove I could do it.

    Sure, superators are idiomatic, wonky, and weird, but for some things it’s just fun to do that (Camping, anyone?). Like I said in my post, don’t use them where lots of people have to critically read your code. Personal projects? Have at it.

    “Use it in your tenderly crafted Ruby DSLs where they make sense.”

  5. Phil about 18 hours later:

    This is great. I’ve been wanting a := operator for a long time for assignment semantics for my own classes. However, I’m guessing that := isn’t something that superator can do because of the ’=’ , is that true?

  6. Jay Phillips about 21 hours later:

    Phil: yeah. Superators is implemented in pure-Ruby and therefore all superators are (perhaps surprisingly) valid Ruby too. If you type it into irb and it reports a SyntaxError, it can’t be a Superator.

  7. Adam Keys about 23 hours later:

    Jay, I love what you’re doing here. You are pushing the boundaries of what one can do in straight Ruby in really intriguing ways. Maybe the “will it be used for good or evil crowd” could be placated with a Superator lint tool for pointing out unwise uses of this great power.

  8. Jaime G. Wong 1 day later:

    The syntax for a valid superator is:

    1) One of these binary operators: ** * / % + – << >> & | ^ <=> >= <= < > === == =~

    2) Followed by as many of these unary operators: – ~ +

    Unfortunately, that rules out the ninja sword and := mentioned before. I was wishing for a _| operator.

  9. Rob 1 day later:

    I installed the gem and used your examples. At first I got this error:

    /superators.rb:4: uninitialized constant String::SuperatorMixin (NameError) from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in ‘gem_original_require’ from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in ‘require’ from TestSup.rb:2

    So the only way I could get things to work was to change it up a bit:

    require ‘superators/version’ require ‘superators/macro’ require ‘superators/monkey_patch’

    class Array include SuperatorMixin extend SuperatorMixin end

    superator "<-" do |operand|
  self << operand.reverse
end

    Any thoughts on that?

  10. Lance Carlson 1 day later:

    This is crazy! You could make Ruby look like PHP (not that you would want to). Just define ->. I love how expressive Ruby can be. I’m sure many Java programmers will also use this to give themselves the ++ operator!

  11. Jay Phillips 1 day later:

    Rob, were you simply using the examples I posted above? If not, could you paste the code that generated that error?

    Also, which version of Ruby are you using? It seems the constant lookup algorithm is strange in your version. If you were doing this on the stock version of Ruby that comes with OSX (version 1.8.2) I would certainly expect some weird issues.

  12. Jay Phillips 1 day later:

    Lance,

    Fortunately those are both syntactically invalid Ruby. A binary ++ operator is possible with Superators but not a unary one that could emulate the C-like numerical increment operator. The binary ++ is more like the Erlang concatenation operator.

    A -> operator is also invalid as well since > is only binary and Ruby will blow up if two binary operators are next to each other.

  13. Rob 1 day later:

    Jay,

    I’m using 1.8.6 on Windows XP. The code I originally used was exactly your example code. The code that worked was supplied in my first post starting with the first require statement (It formatted sort of wierd when it posted)

    require ‘superators/version’ require ‘superators/macro’ require ‘superators/monkey_patch’

    class Array include SuperatorMixin extend SuperatorMixin

    superator ”<-” do |operand| self << operand.reverse end end

  14. John Whitley 1 day later:

    On a related note, it’s worth looking at the usage of user-defined operators in Haskell for good examples of these in action. Personally, I’d love to see a first-class syntax in Ruby for prefix/infix handling of functions ala Haskell’s. But then Jay would lose an excuse for impressive Demented Ruby Tricks like Superators. ;-)

  15. Ashish Ranjan 2 days later:

    thats just cool. what i was looking for my DSLs, as you have exactly mentioned. u rock

    bye :-) Ashish

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Comments