Luke Palmer wrote: > However, my problem remains. What does the poor generic programmer do > when he needs generic equality!?
Well, I'm a pretty generic programmer. I spend lots of time glued to the monitor, I have poor social skills, sometimes my boss has to tell me to dress neater... Anyway, maybe I'm just repeating what was already said in bigger words, but let me propose a concept: =:= is a "generic" comparison operator that simply calls the value_for_comparison method of the objects on left and right. If they both return the same string, then the expression returns true, else it returns false. If they don't have that method, that's a fatal error. Their value_for_comparison() methods must have been defined in the same class, otherwise you're comparing apples and oranges. (Yes, I'm sure we can think of a better name than "value_for_comparison".) Of course, you can also cast the objects to change what type of comparison you want. So, for example, C<$a =:= $b> compares the outputs of the value_for_comparison methods, but C<~$a =:= ~$b> compares the numification of the objects, or, to get into the guts of the matter, the objects are evaluated in numeric context, which causes them to run their overflow methods for numification, which returns number objects, which then call their value_for_comparison methods, which return the numbers as represented by some string which is formatted according to some unambiguous rule (we already have those unabiguou rules). ==, then, becomes just an alias for C<~$a =:= ~$b> and eq becomes an alias for C<+$a =:= +$b>. To find out if the two variables reference the same object, you simply cast them as the fundamental class from which all objects extend. Um, I don't remember the cast operator to do that (is there one?) but say it's simply "ob", you just say C<ob $a =:= $ob $b>. -Miko Miko O'Sullivan Programmer Analyst Rescue Mission of Roanoke
