PHP will compare alpha strings using the greater than and less than comparison operators based upon alphabetical order. In the first example, ai comes before i in alphabetical order so the test of > (greater than) is false – earlier in the order is considered ‘less than’ rather than ‘greater than’. In the second example, … Read more
Short answer: check out how Matrix is doing it. The idea is that coerce returns [equivalent_something, equivalent_self], where equivalent_something is an object basically equivalent to something but that knows how to do operations on your Point class. In the Matrix lib, we construct a Matrix::Scalar from any Numeric object, and that class knows how to … Read more
The literal is not coerced into an instance. What happens internally, is that an instance is created, the value is copied to the instance and the method is carried out using the instance. Then the instance is destroyed. The literal is not actually being used to carry out the method. This “wrapper” object concept is … Read more
Interesting non-trivial problem! MAJOR UPDATE With all that’s happened, I’ve rewrote the answer and removed some dead ends. I also timed the various solutions on different cases. Here’s the first, rather simple but slow, solution: flatten1 <- function(x) { y <- list() rapply(x, function(x) y <<- c(y,x)) y } rapply lets you traverse a list … Read more