I'm more pragmatic and don't think nice mathematical relations per se carry much weight compared to operations that has shown to be useful in practice, such as the current behavior of `-.
The only possible practical use of (a+b)-b == a that I can think of is to perform optimizations, but that's not a good idea partly since it would be applicable extremely seldom and partly because it probably would rule out various custom `+ and `- implementations that are otherwise reasonable.
Whether the current `^ is useful or not I don't know; I've never used it in any case I can remember. Does anyone know a real world example of it? Maybe Peta, who apparently had a case that surprised him?
/ Martin Stjernholm, Roxen IS
Previous text:
2003-02-06 13:33: Subject: Xor
That's a convincing argument. One misght still want a way to delete selected elements completely. Something like a = a & ~(<1,2>) to delete all 1s and 2s.
/ Niels Möller ()