From: ES <ruby-ml@...>
Date: 2005-05-11T10:41:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Getting rid of Object#equal?()?

Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> 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� <florgro@gmail.com> 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.

I do not think any methods should be removed if it can be avoided.
That way there would be no breakage. Aliasing would work fine:

alias_method :eql   :equals?     # Same value
alias_method :equal :same?       # Same object
alias_method :equal :is?

> Gavin

E

-- 
template<typename duck>
void quack(duck& d) { d.quack(); }