Re: generic * and 0

[Kevin Ryde]

"Mikael Djurfeldt" <address@hidden> writes:
>
> If you want to use an operator which is common for numbers and <c>:s,
> why don't you want to use a common zero?  If you don't, the behavior
> of the operator will be inconsistent.

For multiply by 0, I can sort of think of cases when the return type
shouldn't be a fixnum.  If you're doing 0 times a certain size matrix,
then you probably want a matrix full of zeros to come back.  Does that
sound right?

For multiply by 1, I can't actually think of any time you wouldn't
want to get back the object unchanged.  But perhaps if a class has a
notion of multiply, but not "multiply by scalar" then you'd like it to
be overridable so it can be banned.