On Tue, 19 Sep 2017 17:26:55 -0700, Rick Johnson wrote: > Of course, allowing all objects to use the `==`, `!=` sugars makes > perfect sense, but `<`, `>`, `<=`, `>=` are meaningless outside of > numeric-ish types.
You've never wanted to sort strings? How do you sort strings unless you have a concept of which string comes before the other, i.e. < operator? >>> 'xyz' < 'abc' False Same applies to lists of items. Provided the items are compatible with ordering, so are the lists. Likewise other sequences. And for that matter, sets. Maybe we'd prefer to use the proper mathematical operators ⊂ and ⊃ for subset and superset, but a good ASCII equivalent would be < and > instead. Likewise, any time you want to express some sort of order relationship: pawn < rook < knight < bishop < queen < king perhaps. (Although, in real games of chess, the value of a piece partly depends on what other pieces are left on the board.) Or perhaps you have some sort of custom DSL (Domain Specific Language) where > and < make handy symbols for something completely unrelated to ordering: cake > oven # put cake into the oven cake < oven # remove cake from oven I don't mean that as a serious example of a useful DSL. But it is the kind of thing we might want to do. Only hopefully less lame. -- Steven D'Aprano “You are deluded if you think software engineers who can't write operating systems or applications without security holes, can write virtualization layers without security holes.” —Theo de Raadt -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
