[cdr-discuss] AEQUALIS and COMPARE

[Pascal Costanza]

On 15 Feb 2011, at 16:49, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:

> Marco Antoniotti wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 15, 2011, at 15:57 , Nikodemus Siivola wrote:
>> 
>>> On 15 February 2011 16:37, Pascal Costanza <pc at p-cos.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> What about "EQUIVALENT" or "EQUIV", or "EQUIVP"?
>>> 
>>> Or "EQUALS" ?
>>> 
>> 
>> Well, that looks ok, but it sort of implies a subject-verb-complement relation.
>> 
>> I would go for EQUIV or even == (two equal signs).
> 
> EQUALS gets +1 from me.

I don't think EQUALS is ideal, because it may be easily confused with EQUAL or EQUALP when skimming through source code. (I recall having that problem with EQUAL and EQUALP in the past.)

I don't think that's a critical objection, but I wanted to mention this nevertheless.

As an additional thought: It may be a good idea to impose a restriction on the generic functions similar to bullet 19 in http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/11_abab.htm - this would allow CL vendors to recognize uses of the functions on predefined types and optimize them without regard for potential user-defined methods, and it would make interaction of independently developed libraries safer. (For the latter to be really safe, the wording should say something like that at least one of the required parameters in a method definition should be specialized to one of your "own" classes. Not sure if this could be worded in a watertight way...)


Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc at p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Software Languages Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium