> I'm not sure of the details since I don't know much about Java, but that > sounds about right. I'm working on a date library, and having to use > functions like earlier? and later? rather than >, <, <=, and >= feels > awkward.
You are probably thinking of dates as numerical longs rather than actual "dates". If you take a step back from how the date is represented, it is much clearer to say (earlier? date1 date2) than (< date1 date2) The latter is open to interpretation and would force any good programmer to look up what less-than does on the dates in order to get an intuition about what it *actually* means, whereas most everyone would agree with what the former is intended to mean. '<' could be defined as "happened after" and be a *valid* function definition. If "earlier?" was defined as "happened after" it would be considered a bug. I realize this is just one use case, but overloading operators can often decrease readability. That said, it can also be extremely convenient and make for more flexible libraries, so perhaps the argument about a fast math library and convenient non-math behavior by default is the way to go... Btw, if you are implementing a date library, I would strongly recommend looking at Joda Time. You could probably just write some clojure wrappers for the library and be done with it (of course, that would require that the Joda Time jar be on the classpath...). --Eric Tschetter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
