Re: Overloading (CVS commit) - Relationals implemented

You are moving this feature along! Very cool!

I've been meaning to get some opinions on relational operator 
overloading of equality (and inequality etc...). In Java (and C++ when 
not specifically overloaded I guess) the == operator is a plain old 
pointer comparison. In java when you want to compare the content of two 
strings you say:

string1.equals(string2)

kinda wordy I know, that's why in moto we have eq for this

string1 eq string2

and we also have lt,gt,lte,and gte for the rest of the string equality 
comparisons.

The reason I didn't overload == for strings when coding conditionals 
originally is that I felt there was value in always being able to test 
pointer equality of  two objects with == since there are cases where 
you want to verify you have the same instance of an object (as opposed 
to an equivalent object).

So I'm wondering now if we want to make == overloadable at all since 
its default behavior is applicable to all objects by default, and 
instead offer overloading only of the 'eq' operator and the other 
string comparison operators so they really become 'programmatic object 
comparison operators'

On Saturday, April 26, 2003, at 10:12  AM, Stefano Corsi wrote:

> - moved motox_try_overloaded_binary_op to 
> motox_try_overloaded_method_op in
> motox.c
> - created motox_try_overloaded_function_op
> - moved motov_fillArgs to motox.c
> - changed static storage to non static for motoi_callEDF and 
> motoi_callMDF in
> motox (to permit call from inside motox.c). Prototypes in motoi.h.
> - implemented iset_comp2 in intset_op.c (for comparing with size).
> - implemented iset_equal iset_notequal iset_gt iset_lt in intset_op.c

What does

iset1 < iset2

mean ? Is it based on the size of the sets ?

> - added operators to IntSet.i
> - changed over_intset.moto in tests
>
> Adding relational was smooth!
>
That's how you know your implementation is the right one :) everything 
just starts falling into place!

> Stefano
>
-Dave