Draft proposal: allow the use of relational operators on Comparable classes (original) (raw)

Reinier Zwitserloot reinier at zwitserloot.com
Fri Mar 20 08:17:07 PDT 2009

Your average java programmer does not know that the lexer is greedy,
and making knowledge of this mandatory to understand what's happening
when Joe Q. Java sees "5.<.4" is a bad idea.

--Reinier Zwitserloot

On Mar 19, 2009, at 17:41, Tom Hawtin wrote:

Howard Lovatt wrote:

Dots are also a bad solution because you can get confusing expressions:

5.<.4_ _Is this:_ _(5.) < (.4)_ _This is a lexical issue. The lexer is greedy, so yes the tokens_ _would be_ _"5." "<" ".4"[1]. I don't believe this lexical issue would be a real_ _problem in real code. For instance the expressions "f<.4" and "i.<.4"_ _would both work as expected._ _Tom_ _[1] >> and >>> are the only real oddities in Java. As well as being double and triple close of generics, they are some obscure operators that don't really belong in Java (IMO).

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