Misc #15654: Documentation for Complex is wrong or misleading

• Status: Open
• Assignee: -

[sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)]

The documentation for Complex https://ruby-doc.org/core-2.6/Complex.html says or implies that a complex can be created by literal like 2+1i, but that is actually calling the method + on receiver 2 with argument 1i. The description should be changed to make it clear that 2+ 1i is not a literal but is applying a method.

[Hanmac (Hans Mackowiak)]

@nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada): i don't know if that would be better, but can the parser be changed to support that stuff like "2+1i" would create the Complex object directly?

[sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada)]

Actually, currently, there is no literal for complex numbers whose real part is non-zero. I think we need a literal to cover such cases. If something along nobu's suggestion works, that would be preferable.

[Hanmac (Hans Mackowiak)]

sawa (Tsuyoshi Sawada) wrote:

Actually, currently, there is no literal for complex numbers whose real part is non-zero. I think we need a literal to cover such cases. If something along nobu's suggestion works, that would be preferable.

it wasn't a suggestion from him, i just wanted to ping him so he can see the message

[nobu (Nobuyoshi Nakada)]

There would be a chance to optimize such expressions, but it is not a single literal syntactically, and constant folding is disabled in Ruby for its dynamic nature.
New literal syntax will be needed for an (impurely) imaginary number literal, but I doubt that we really need it.