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

[Reinier Zwitserloot]

Your average java programmer does not know that the lexer is greedy,  
and making knowledge of this mandatory to understand what's happening  
when Joe Q. Java sees "5.<.4" is a bad idea.


  --Reinier Zwitserloot



On Mar 19, 2009, at 17:41, Tom Hawtin wrote:

> Howard Lovatt wrote:
>> Dots are also a bad solution because you can get confusing  
>> expressions:
>>
>> 5.<.4
>>
>> Is this:
>>
>> (5.) < (.4)
>
> This is a lexical issue. The lexer is greedy, so yes the tokens  
> would be
> "5." "<" ".4"[1]. I don't believe this lexical issue would be a real
> problem in real code. For instance the expressions "f<.4" and "i.<.4"
> would both work as expected.
>
> Tom
>
> [1] >> and >>> are the only real oddities in Java. As well as being
> double and triple close of generics, they are some obscure operators
> that don't really belong in Java (IMO).
>