At 11:55 17/02/2006, Stefan Walk wrote:
On 16/02/06, Zeev Suraski <
[email protected]> wrote:
In languages where operator overloading is supported, it comes hand
in hand with strict typing, which wouldn't allow for different values
for x>y and y<x...
Zeev
That's not true, Ruby for example has operator overloading, and has no
problems with different meanings of x>y and y<x (but i don't know a
core class that does that).
Also, PHP already breaks the transitivity rule for the equality
operator ($a == $b and $b == $c does not imply $a == $c), so there's
not much new evil if a user can, by loading an extension, break the
symmetry of the comparison operators, IMO.
Oh I disagree. While we do have some unique cases in which transitivity is not maintained, they are quite, well, unique, and arguably make sense.
More importantly, the discussion here is not about transitivity (although it does have transitivity implications). It's more fundamental, it's about the very meaning of smaller-than / greater-than and the relationship between them.
Zeev