[cdr-discuss] AEQUALIS and COMPARE

[Pascal Costanza]

On 15 Feb 2011, at 14:36, Attila Lendvai wrote:

>> - The idea that COMPARE returns symbols also seems weird to me. Wouldn't it be better to return numbers (-1, 0, +1 or NIL)? Can't immediately tell why, though.
> 
> 
> you need to return well-known identities that communicate the result.
> -1,0,+1 are the easy way for well-known identities in C. in CL,
> symbols provide a much nicer framework to deal with well-known
> identities IMO.

I guess my main reason for suggesting fixnums as return values here is that they are easier to use for table lookups. Not sure if that's very relevant, though...

(svref some-table (1+ (compare this that)))


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