Implement Char#*(times) operator

[Sija]

Comes useful when in need to repeat just one Char without reverting to String.

[RX14]

bytesize == 0 is impossible

[Sija]

See my previous comment.

[Sija]

@RX14 I was still thinking of String, my bad - thanks for pointing that out! just fix-ed it ™

[RX14]

Call times count internally?

[Sija]

Implementation is taken straight from String#*

[lbguilherme]

I would prefer to change both here and at String#*

[Sija]

I changed it in both, String#* and Char#* methods.

[lbguilherme]

LGTM

[bcardiff]

@Sija why named arguments in an infix operator?

[Sija]

@bcardiff See #3860 (comment)

[bcardiff]

Sorry for joining late :-), but it's hard to imagine someone will write "aString".*(times=3).
I am ok with either name, but I see no point with the named argument in an infix operator.

Unless there is a reason I would drop that. Again any internal name is ok.

[Sija]

Fair point, although I was thinking about the docs, where the argument name is shown.

[bcardiff]

ditto.

And in this case, this change is just a param rename. I get the consistency, but, is there any reason to prefer times over count in both cases?

[asterite]

Sorry, I'll have to intervene and say no to this. What's the use case for this?

Plus, doing 'a' * 1 # => "a" feels strange. And then, chars and integers are usually intermixed, and we definitely don't want to suddenly allow multiplying chars by integers with a string as a result. String#* already allocates memory, so if you have a single char and need it repeated times (and this something that will probably never happen) then convert it to a String first.

Finally:

'a' + 1 # => b
'a' * 2 # => "aa"

Doesn't make sense at all.

Plus the code for multiplying a Char and String is almost identical, I wouldn't like to have that in the codebase.

[Sija]

@asterite Fair 'nuff, I was thinking too about intermixing chars and integers which doesn't makes much sense. Also, we need to allocate String anyway so performance gain is minute if any. Thanks for looking into it!