Re: Motions 20 and 21 on comparisons
John Pryce wrote:
At present I support Ulrich's 7 comparisons, but Arnold's minimalism "I
never needed any comparison of intervals except for three" is very
attractive.
It is a reasonable question.
One thing people should take into consideration is that many programming
languages will likely require bindings for relations such as <, <=, etc. In
C++, for example, some of the standard template library requires that
objects stored in various sorted data structures such as lists, vectors,
etc. must have these relation operators defined.
So although standardizing Ulrich's 7 comparisons might be regarded on the
one hand as "syntactic sugar," if P1788 doesn't standardize their meaning,
users and/or language committes might prescribe different definitions to
these relation operators. That could potentially be a can of worms.
Sincerley,
Nate Hayes