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

[Neal Gafter]

Vilya-

I suspect that if you narrowed the scope of this proposal to just enum
types, it would have a much better chance of getting accepted for project
Coin.  Because enum types are instance-controlled by the language, you are
guaranteed that == and != have a meaning that is consistent with the
relational operators.  Then, we could consider generalizing the mechanism to
other types as a separate decision in Java 7 or 8 (or not).

Regards,
Neal

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.
>
>
>
>