3 ms·

I've had a lot of success in my own language designs with dividing the problem into two cases, equality and identity, or EQUALP and EQ in CL lingo. Despite havi

by codr7 7y ago

I've had a lot of success in my own language designs with dividing the problem into two cases, equality and identity, or EQUALP and EQ in CL lingo. Despite having written a ton of CL over the years, I still fail to remember the specifics of EQL & EQUAL. Defaulting to full value equality does come with a performance cost, but I feel like we're mostly past the point where we should waste precious time on these kinds of micro optimizations for most use cases. https://github.com/codr7/gfoo https://github.com/codr7/gfoo

ska 7y ago
I agree at least separating identity and equality seem to be important in practice. I'm not completely sold on where the other lines should be. I don't love the CL implementation, particular eql vs equalp on numerics seems fiddly, and it's hard to keep all the cases separate. Homoiconicity introduces the need for a "representation equality" i guess which isn't always needed, etc.