4 ms·

I don't know about bloat per se, but I think putting `equals` on all objects is a design flaw. This implicitly assumes that every object has a single implementa

I don't know about bloat per se, but I think putting `equals` on all objects is a design flaw. This implicitly assumes that every object has a single implementation that works for every case, which is frequently false. Some objects have no semantically meaningful concept of "equals". Others have situation-specific definitions. A better design (which C# has made some steps towards) is defining interfaces for Equatable and Hashable, and requiring the object to implement methods that return them. Then they can return them or not, or have multiple implementations of each if needed. Or users of the objects can define their own, custom implementations easily.

exabrial 5y ago
The vast majority do though. This was a design decision to be useful 85% of the time and allow for graceful degradation into edge cases (you can always just return false from equals() always)
chii 5y ago
> Equatable and Hashable ... have multiple implementations of each if needed i dont believe this would fix the problem, because the reason you'd want multiple implementations is because you'd want to use different ones under different circumstances that may only be determined at runtime anyway. I much prefer the haskell way of thinking about typeclasses, but this mechanism is fairly difficult to implement in java...may be object algebra can potentially be used? see this paper https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2012/ecoop2012.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=www.cs.utexas.ed...