[elephant-devel] get-instances-by-range should work with string types

[Alain Picard]

Ian Eslick <eslick at csail.mit.edu> writes:

> Now you can approximate this by mapping your non-integer objects into an
> integer space according to your own ordering.  This is provided for in
> the (add-class-derived-index ...) ... [SNIP]

Ah, ok.  I missed that.  That's kinda what I had in mind by a protocol
to tell elephant how to define ordering and comparison on the objects
indexed in a slot.  I'll experiment with this and see if I can get
it to do what I want.  This is a more general mechanism than the trivial
patch I submitted, so I wouldn't rush to commit what I sent.

> However it may work for strings today because ordering is based on the
> order of binary bytes in the serialized representation of lisp data.

Okay.

> I'll see if I can document all this better in the next release; it's
> helpful getting all this input to see what is confusing to new users and
> what features they want!

Well, I'm happy to keep helping by asking questions, hopefully
they won't all be stupid.  ;-)

                           --ap