[Aldor-l] exports and constants

[Ralf Hemmecke]

On 07/25/2006 02:31 AM, Bill Page wrote:
> On July 24, 2006 5:15 PM Ralf Hemmecke wrote:
>> ...
>> ---BEGIN aaa11.as
>> #include "aldor"
>> #include "aldorio"
>> a: Integer == 1;
>> a: String == "b";

> Strange.

Well. To be honest, I would not have believed that this was possible 
until I tried it yesterday.

> It never occurred to me that one could "overload"
> all constants (overloaded function names are common practice).

Well I had deliberately written

foo: Integer -> Integer == (i: Integer): Integer +-> i;

instead of (the syntactic sugar)

foo(i: Integer): Integer == i;

in order to demonstrate that functions are nothing else than constants 
(with a type that involves "->", though). So why should they be treated 
differently to constants whose type does not involve "->"?

> But of course 0 and 1 are just such constants that are
> commonly overloaded in this way.

Right. And in order to make it clear: 0 and 1 are quite different from 2 
and all the other integer-like looking literals. 0 and 1 are 
*identifiers* in Aldor just like iAmAVariable, odd?, set!, etc. That are 
the two exceptions where an identifier need not start with a letter or 
an underscore. Otherwise you would not be able to write

0: %

into the signatures of a category.

Ralf