I was reading past section 4.1 of the F# spec, Operator Names, when an idea occurred to me: can I define custom operators that have no other ‘normal’ definition? I had seen some stuff in the spec that suggested how one might do this, so I gave it a go. I constructed a nonsense operator: &^^%. Let’s look at the code first:
1 #light
2
3 let (&^^%) x y = x + y
4
5 printfn “%d” (10 &^^% 32)
The output:
42
(Yeah, I’m a Hitchhiker’s Guide fan.) What did we really do? Well, I asked Reflector what it thought it saw. The response in C#:
I see this method:
1 public static int op_AmpHatHatPercent(int x, int y)
2 {
3 return (x + y);
4 }
and I see it being called like so:
1 FastFunc<int, Unit> func = Pervasives.printfn<FastFunc<int, Unit>>(new Format<FastFunc<int, Unit>, TextWriter, Unit, Unit, int>(“%d”));
2 int num = Program.op_AmpHatHatPercent(10, 0x20);
3 func.Invoke(num);
What I find interesting is that the compiler has a mechanism to convert the punctuation symbols into a function name. The rest seems kind of sensible/obvious. That is, the solution makes sense. This does bring up a few interesting questions:
- What is FastFunc?
- What is Pervasives?
FastFunc has this description in the docs:
The .NET type used to represent F# function values. This type is not typically used directly from F# code, though may be used from other .NET languages.
An instance of FastFunc defines an Invoke method. The type has several static/class members to do an InvokeFast with 3, 4, 5, or 6 parameters.
Pervasives represents the set of functions that are automatically visible in any F# application without making an explicit reference to the Microsoft.FSharp.Core.Pervasives namespace.
Karmic Code Monkey 