HaloO Larry, you wrote:
You guys should read The Search for the Perfect Language, by Umberto Eco. It would disabuse you of the notion that perfect orthogonality is possible or even desirable.
I'm sorry if my contributions to this thread are annoying. But one question remains that might actually make Duncan's proposal pointless. Are the comparison operators available for overloading just like any other operator or is the casting of the operands performed *before* dispatch sees the actual types? If overloading is possible than the numeric and string comparison should be adhered to "in spirit". I can imagine to have a role Order that composes the comparison ops. E.g. Order[Num] composes <, >, >=, <= and <=>. Order[Str] composes lt, gt, ge, le and leg. You get both when composing Order[Num|Str]. The generic Order[Foo] would compose before, after, their negations and cmp. Order would imply Comparable, that is the equality checks ===, eqv, == and eq. Comparable would take the same type parameters as Order and compose different sets of ops accordingly. The binding check =:= is hardly useful for overloading because it operates on the namespace level. Regards, TSa. --
