On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Mark Miesfeld <miesf...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 1:48 PM, Rick McGuire <object.r...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > This is fairly simple to implement for the equals/not equals variants.
> The
> > real open question is how to handle the other comparisons such as >, <,
> etc.
> > These are probably VERY rare situations, but the behavior still needs to
> be
> > defined. I see three obvious paths:
> >
> > 1) Leave them the way they are today. For these operators, the
> operation
> > will go through the existing string conversion and perform the
> comparison on
> > the string value "The Nil Object".
> >
> > 2) Have them always return .false. It sort of makes sense, but it
> creates
> > some unexpected behavior such as "a > .nil" and "a < .nil" both returning
> > .false.
> >
> > 3) Make this an error. This, of course, will really break the rare
> program
> > that happens to be doing this. On the other hand, the reverse comparison
> > ".nil > a" IS an error today, because only the String class implements
> those
> > comparison methods.
> >
> > I suspect 1) is the course that makes the most sense and will have the
> least
> > disruption. But I'm interested in opinions on this, and I may have
> missed
> > other potential solutions.
>
> I'll have to think about this some more.
>
> But, my first impression was that .nil is neither less than nor
> greater than anything, so returning .false sort of makes sense to me.
> This wouldn't surprise me too much: "a > .nil" and "a < .nil" both
> return .false.
>
> Aren't some things just the way they are by definition? For the docs:
> By definition .nil is neither greater than nor less than anything.
>
Yes, the classic example is NaN in floating point numbers. In fact, NaN is
not even equal to itself!
Rick
>
> --
> Mark Miesfeld
>
>
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