On 2008-Dec-15, at 4:18 pm, Jon Lang wrote:
If you've got a list of Pairs, you use a sorting algorithm that's
designed for sorting Pairs (which probably sorts by key first, then
uses the values to break ties).
Agreed.
If you've got a list that has a mixture of Pairs and non-Pairs, I
think that the sorting algorithm should complain: it's clearly a
case of being asked to compare apples and oranges.
If there's no cmp(Pair, Other::Thing) defined, then it would fall back
to string-comparison, which seems fair to me. But complaining isn't
unreasonable either, since it's easy to coerce stuff to strings if
that's what you want.
I guess you could force complaining with: infix<cmp>:(Any, Any) =
{ die "Apples and oranges!" }
When are you going to be asked to stringify or numify a Pair?
Actual use-cases, please. Personally, I can't think of any.
say $pair;
I can't really think of a great example where you'd want to numify a
pair, but I would expect printing one to produce something like "a =>
23" (especially since that's what a one-element hash would print,
right?).
-David
