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

On Friday, May 6, 2005, 10:04:37 AM, Yukihiro wrote:

> Hi,

> In message "Re: Getting rid of Object#equal?()?"
>     on Thu, 5 May 2005 23:57:30 +0900, Florian Gro<[e-mail]> writes:

> |I think that we currently have too many equality methods with similar names:
> |
> |==: same meaning
> |eql?: same value (for hashes)
> |equal?: identical object
> |
> |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'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?

I'm not so smart; I've had to consult the documentation several times
to distinguish them.  Probably the simplest solution (psuedu-code):

  class Object
    remove_method :equal?
    alias_method :same? :eql?
  end

I'd rather use the methods #same? and #== and forget about everything
else.

Gavin