Feature suggestion: Add static equals methods to Float and Double

[Hans Boehm]

IIUC,  isSubstitutible() is not quite what's being proposed here. The
proposed definition here uses floatToIntBits(), not floatToRawIntBits().

Hans

On Sun, Jan 6, 2019 at 3:59 PM Brian Goetz <brian.goetz at oracle.com> wrote:

> Followers of Project Valhalla will see that this issue comes up when
> defining equality on value types.  The relation you are looking for is
> being called "substitutible"; it asks whether there is any way to
> distinguish between two values.  For primitives other than float/double,
> this coincides with `==`, and similarly for references.
>
> An `isSubstitutible()` API point will likely emerge from Valhalla.
>
> On 1/6/2019 2:01 PM, some-java-user-99206970363698485155 at vodafonemail.de
> wrote:
> > My main goal was to provide a way where NaN is equal to NaN and I went
> with the behavior of the
> > respective wrapper classes, Float and Double, which consider -0.0 and
> +0.0 as not equal.
> > The static method could be called "exactlyEquals" if that is better.
> >
> > It might also depend on the usecase whether you want -0.0 being equal to
> +0.0. Maybe an additional
> > method would be required for the case you are describing, e.g.
> "valueEquals" (though that can be
> > ambiguous).
> >
> >> Hans Boehm <hboehm at google.com> hat am 6. Januar 2019 um 19:40
> geschrieben:
> >>
> >>
> >> What's the motivation for making it easier to spell a comparison method
> that tells me that -1.0*0.0 is not equal to 1.0*0.0? I would have thought
> that making this somewhat hard to write is a feature?
> >>
> >> I agree that there are cases in which this method is useful. But they
> all seem esoteric enough to me that it's not unreasonable for users to have
> enough expertise to write the method. Or at least the method should have a
> name that makes the unusual behavior explicit.
>
>