Re: Overloading StringJoin
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg109819] Re: Overloading StringJoin
- From: Mark Adler <madler at alumni.caltech.edu>
- Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 07:02:20 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <hsr8al$bev$1@smc.vnet.net> <hstadv$e3i$1@smc.vnet.net>
Thank you all for your replies. On 2010-05-17 23:00:31 -0700, gekko said: > On May 17, 9:12 pm, Mark Adler <mad... at alumni.caltech.edu> wrote: >> Unprotect[StringJoin]; >> x_List <> y_List := x~Join~y >> Protect[StringJoin]; > This may work fine for your current needs, but what happens when you > actually need the StringJoin function? Well, obviously I wrote so that I can still use <> to join strings. This still works: "ab" <> "cd" abcd However as pointed out by Albert Retey, it breaks the flat behavior of <> where normally this: {{"a", "b"}, "c"} <> {"d", {"e", {"f", "g"}}} produces the single string: abcdefg whereas with my violation of StringJoin it returns: {{a, b}, c, d, {e, {f, g}}} That's enough reason for me to not do it, since something else may depend on that. Too bad. <> looks good for a join function and is easy to type. Chris pointed out the Notation package. I hadn't noticed that before. (I probably haven't noticed about 90% of what Mathematica can do.) So now I can do something like: << Notation` InfixNotation[NotationTemplateTag[**], Join] {1, 2} ** {3, 4} {1, 2, 3, 4} I'm sure that there's something wrong with using ** as well, but anyway you get the idea. I can make up my own symbol. Mark