Re: [lmi] [lmi-commits] master 6b93e91 11/12: Remove an unneeded auxiliary function

[Greg Chicares]

On 2018-05-23 17:24, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> On Tue, 22 May 2018 17:09:23 -0400 (EDT) Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> GC> -        increase_to_if_smaller(max_header_lines_, std::size_t(h / lh));
> GC> +        max_header_lines_ = std::max(max_header_lines_, std::size_t(h / 
> lh));
[...]
>  This is not terribly important, but I regret this function disappearance
> because IMHO the old version was more clear than the new one: you need to
> carefully scan the line now to confirm that the same variable appears in
> both the LHS and the RHS, whereas it was immediately clear before.

(OTOH, it wasn't necessarily obvious to me which argument was increased.)

>  Of course, "max" is standard

That's its conclusive advantage IMO.

> but it doesn't allow to avoid
> specifying the variable name twice, which is a significant disadvantage.
> It's unfortunate that C++ doesn't have "a max= b" to go with "a += b" etc
> (Perl 6, of course, does).

When reviewing this commit I dreamt of user-defined primitives, with an
extensible character set, which would let us write APL's '⌈' and '⌊'
for max() and min():
  max_header_lines_ ⌈= std::size_t(h / lh);