From: "Florian Groß" <florgro@...>
Date: 2005-05-06T11:13:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting rid of Object#equal?()?

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> I'm not motivated too much to remove "equal?".  I assume Ruby users
> smart enough to distinguish above three without any confusion once
> they are told.  Are there any reason to remove?

While they are documented it can be irritating to have to look up what 
one you ought to implement for hash compliance, especially if you 
haven't done so frequently. I think it is like that because both of them 
actually "sound" the same way and in this case it is harder to use a 
length-based mnemonic than in the .to_a / .to_ary case. I think that 
different things should have different names.

I think using essentially the same name for two closely related things 
does not help to avoid confusion. Of course, it depends on how closely 
you think identity and value equivalence are related. (In German there 
is even linguistic confusion between "das Selbe" and "das Gleiche".)