Fwd: Draft proposal: allow the use of relational operators on Comparable classes

[Vilya Harvey]

Accidentally hit reply instead of reply-all when responding to Neal. Here's
the response.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Vilya Harvey <vilya.harvey at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/3/11
Subject: Re: Draft proposal: allow the use of relational operators on
Comparable classes
To: Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com>


Hi Neal & thanks for the feedback.

I mentioned that in the proposal as one of the problem areas & suggested
giving precedence to the unboxing operation as a solution (i.e. if a type
can be unboxed, unbox it and do the comparison; otherwise, call compareTo).
Does that create further problems that I'm missing? I guess it would make
the desugaring a bit more complex than I'd written in the proposal, for one
thing.

Vil.


2009/3/10 Neal Gafter <neal at gafter.com>

This proposal is incompatible with the existing behavior of the
> comparison operators on the boxed value classes, particularly for
> Float and Double.
>
> On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 9:09 AM, Vilya Harvey <vilya.harvey at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I've attached a draft of a proposal to allow classes which implement the
> > Comparable interface to be used as operands for the relational operators.
> So
> > for example if you had two Strings, a and b, you would be able to write
> >
> > if (a < b) {
> >    ...
> > }
> >
> > instead of
> >
> > if (a.compareTo(b) < 0) {
> >    ...
> > }
> >
> > and you could do the same with your own classes as well.
> >
> > Thanks in advance for any feedback,
> >
> > Vil.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>