Finding the spirit of L-World

[Brian Goetz]

On 1/8/2019 11:20 AM, forax at univ-mlv.fr wrote:
>> Right.  And I'm saying, we can't sell that.  Values should work like an
>> int; you can compare ints with ==.   I think the "Currently" story
>> doesn't wash.
> You can not use the "work like an int" argument here, a value type can contain references, so it doesn't work like an int.

Sorry, I don't buy it.

One of the primary use cases for value types is numerics.  Are we 
seriously telling people that they can't compare non-intrinsnic numerics 
with `==`?  I realize that from a VM perspective, the "values have no 
==" seems sound, but for the 99.9999% of Java developers that are not VM 
engineers, I don't think a single one of them will buy it.

> John proposed to stop the recursivity at some point, but it will be very surprising too !

No, in corner cases like this (and surely this is at least a corner of a 
corner), we eat the recursion.  That's the sensible equality semantics 
for embedding a linked lists in a value.

> So for now, i think the only possible semantics is to consider that '==' means an address comparison for all kind of classes (reference or value class), so a value class acts like a class for == and given that a value has no address, it should return false.

That's certainly not the only solution.  Nor do I think its a remotely 
good one for Java developers.