Re: [Pharo-dev] about ~=

[Ben Coman]

Yuriy Tymchuk wrote: I think that while working with float arithmetic it will be nice to provide something like #~= instead of #closeTo:, and also add #~<, #~<= and so on. But maybe I’m wrong :) I don't think you'd be able to repurpose #~= to a different meaning.  That way lies madness.  However I do still sometimes find myself thinking "approximately equal" instead of "not equal" when I see "~".   I'd be very tempted by "!=" if it was available, but in reality I'd be worried about compatibility across smalltalk platforms. cheers -ben Uko On 26 Jun 2014, at 13:07, Christophe Demarey <christophe.dema...@inria.fr> wrote: Le 26 juin 2014 à 12:46, Nicolas Cellier a écrit : $! is not classified as a binary character right now, is it? Of course it's possible but I'd just say why this particular symbol? It does not look mathematical either. Or do you love C/C++ so much? Of course not. It is just because it is something widely used but other names could do the stuff like <> or /= Note that ~= has same meaning in Matlab. Nice to know we are not totally unique. I came across someone's related query... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3865103/why-is-not-equal-represented-by-in-matlab There are other possibilities like /=  or <> (Fortran 95, ADA), even the long form =/=. But frankly, I don't buy this kind of change, for the sake of looking like some {} language, making such a deep change is overkill. Indeed it is a deep change but maybe at least we could have an alias and use it for all new code. At a time, it will be less painful to do this change. As expressed in another thread, Smalltalk code convention for method naming strategy is intention revealing. That said, I think ~= is not intention revealing and it will be good to fix or propose a good alternative.