On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 03:22:33AM -0700, Luke Palmer wrote:($a =:= $b; # looks a little better)
I like =:= as identity operator if we want one. If not, as long as .id returns something that compares properly with both == and eq, I'm happy.
Agreed, =:= is nice looking.
As I said before, I would strongly doubt that there will be an .id method _at all_ on any builtin types/classes -- because unless we used memory location as the id, it would imply that a separate id had to be calculated and stored with each object, which would be expensive, and if we _did_ use mem location as the id, getting and storing the id would be largely useless, since it could change unpredictably.
So I would imagine it _is_ possible to test that two values "have the same identity", but I would imagine it is -not- possible to actually get what that identity "is". There's no .id method, per se, unless you create one yourself.
As to whether we want on identity op, the only purpose would be when building your own classes, so that string, numeric, smartmatch, and true identity comparisions could be overloaded separately. We'd almost certainly have "identical" mean "points to the same object in memory", as opposed to the fuzzier matching of the other variants. Which sounds like a very good idea to me.
We've talked about this before, and let it drop. We should decide... well, we should encourage the deciders to decide. Myself, I strongly vote for -no- .id function, but for an identity-test operator separate from ==, eq, and ~~. Called C<=:=>
MikeL
