Re: Getting rid of Object#equal?()?

On Thu, 5 May 2005, [ISO-8859-15] Florian Growrote:
> I think that we currently have too many equality methods with similar names:
> I think that equal?() is rarely used and that removing it completely would 
> make sense -- after all  a.id == b.id  is not much longer than a.equal?(b).

I would agree, except for backwards-compatibility issues.

> Renaming it might also be an option -- I think Object#identical?() would be a 
> good name.

also Object#same? would be a better and shorter name, but I don't really 
care because I'd rather write it a.id==b.id and then I rarely ever need 
to even do that.

> I would also like to see eql?() renamed, but I'm not sure about the name 
> and it also seems to be used much more which would make a change more 
> troublesome. Perhaps hash_equal?() would be a better name.

it would be troublesome to do that kind of thing because #eql? and #hash 
are the "hashable" interface which gets redefined by user-defined code, 
and then renaming is much trickier (aliases are pretty wrong in that 
case). So I don't agree with this part of the proposal.

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