Dear Christian, On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Christian Bauer wrote:
Apparently somebody once upon a time had a reason not to consider index dimension as operands.
The dimension is an attribute of an index, but not a subexpression (it doesn't even show up in the default output of an index). It just happens to be of type 'ex'...
This is, besides defamation of index dimensions ("it doesn't even show up!"), saying the same as I did in other words. What I am wondering about is a real reason. Having index dimensions as an operand would be easier sometimes (e.g., in matching and so on one has to know the index dimension and it cannot be a wildcard, resulting in either seperately passing around dimension parameters that are actually present in the expressions or calls to functions with the sole purpose of finding out what the index dimensions are) and I cannot really think of a reason why it would be bad for index dimensions to be operands. Well, at the moment changing it would probably be a bad idea because it would break existing code. Best wishes, Chris