Introduction
As a developer, I'm involved in writing a lot of mathematical code everyday and I'd like to add very few syntactic sugar to the C# language to ease code writing and reviewing.
I've already read about this thread and this other one for possible solutions and would simply like to know which best direction to go and how much effort it may represent to solve only for the three following syntactical issues*.
*: I can survive without described syntactic sugars, but if it ain't too much work and Rube-Goldberg design for simple compilation process, it may be interesting to investigate further.
1. Multiple output arguments
I'd like to write:
[double x, int i] = foo(z);
Instead of:
double x;
int i;
foo(out x, out i, z);
NB: out
parameters being placed first and foo
being declared as usual (or using same kind of syntax).
2. Additional operators
I'd like to have a few new unary/binary operators. Don't know much how to define for these (and it seems quite complex for not introducing ambiguity when parsing sources), anyway would like to have something like:
namespace Foo
{
using binary operator "\" as "MyMath.LeftDivide";
using unary operator "'" as "MyMath.ConjugateTranspose";
public class Test
{
public void Example()
{
var y = x';
var z = x \ y;
}
}
}
Instead of:
namespace Foo
{
public class Test
{
public void Example()
{
var y = MyMath.ConjugateTranspose(x);
var z = MyMath.LeftDivide(x, y);
}
}
}
3. Automatic name insertion for static classes
It's extremely unappealing to endlessly repeating Math.BlaBlaBla() everywhere in a computation code instead of writing directly and simply BlaBlaBla.
For sure this can be solved by adding local methods to wrap Math.BlaBlaBla inside computation class. Anyway would be better when there's no ambiguity at all, or when ambiguity would be solved with some sort of implicit
keyword, to automatically insert class names when required.
For instance:
using System;
using implicit MySystem; // Definying for 'MyMaths.Math.Bessel'
public class Example
{
public Foo()
{
var y = 3.0 * Cos(12.0);
var z = 3.0 * Bessel(42);
}
// Local definition of 'Bessel' function again
public static double Bessel(double x)
{
...
}
}
Would become:
using System;
using MySystem; // Definying for 'Math.Bessel'
public class Example
{
public Foo()
{
var y = 3.0 * System.Math.Cos(12.0); // No ambiguity at all
var z = 3.0 * MySystem.Math.Bessel(42); // Solved from `implicit` keyword
}
// Local definition of 'Bessel' function again
public static double Bessel(double x)
{
...
}
}
* The compiler may simply generate a warning to indicate that it solved the ambiguity because an implicit
solution has been defined.
NB: 3) is satisfying enough for solving 2).