You're welcome to try and merge that into Ruby core itself. That said, "I like whitespace" isn't a good reason to add a new operator over a method. Ruby is object oriented, meaning you are calling methods on objects.
Then why have 2 * 4 when you can write 2.multiply_by 4...
What I love about ruby is its focus on making programming delightful rather than adhering to weird ass rules like 'Ruby is object oriented, meaning you are calling methods on objects.' that people pretend are laws of physics when really you can break them anytime you want, unlike laws of physics.
The difference here is that `` literally maps onto a method called `` in Ruby. I find this aspect of Ruby delightful and it's not something I willingly chip away at.
Generally speaking, Ruby eschews syntax that invokes a protocol behind the scenes for a consistent 1:1 mapping between method syntax and the methods they invoke.
Compilation Order: Smalltalk-78 had perpetuated the post-evaluation of receiver expressions so as to avoid delving into the stack to find the receiver. In the Smalltalk-80 language, however, we encoded the number of arguments in the send instruction. This enabled strictly left- to-right evaluation, and no one has since complained about surprising order of evaluation. We suspect that this change will yield further fruit in the future when someone tries to build a very simple compiler.
https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/d61baee52adcd1baebe15f10...
You're welcome to try and merge that into Ruby core itself. That said, "I like whitespace" isn't a good reason to add a new operator over a method. Ruby is object oriented, meaning you are calling methods on objects.