Talk:String comparison

Promote to task

Is there any reason why we shouldn't promote this to a full task? It seems clear enough and possible to implement in many different languages. –Donal Fellows 22:12, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

generic comparison and coercive comparison

Someone mentioned generic comparison and coercive comparison. We probably need some explanation of what both of those mean.

Markhobley 21:08, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

How's it now? The distinction I'm trying to get across is that some operators MIGHT give you string comparison semantics (or some other semantics), while other operators MUST give you string comparison semantics (or fail). It's an important distinction in some languages, or at least in Perl 6. :-) But even for languages that only give you polymorphic operators (Python) or coercive operators (Perl 5--at least in the absence of overloading), it's still an important semantic difference. --TimToady 00:41, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

if a string operator operates on a non-string it can:

Complain about it.
Or if the non-string has an agreed string representation it can convert the non-string then work on the string result.

Some languages do the former, some the latter. (It's also complicated by some languages having only generic comparison operators, i.e. comparing numbers and strings use the exact same operator). --Paddy3118 10:56, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

Excellent. Cheers guys! That looks a lot better. Markhobley 11:19, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

REXX

what is the exclamation mark good for in this line

!\>> Strictly Not Greater Than

and others? --Walterpachl 21:31, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

Right, I'm not sure off the top of my head. It has probably been caused by me because the data that I provide usually comes from my own documentation development wiki that requires the addition of the exclamation mark to suppress the wiki engine from interpreting the following backslash symbol, and I have reformatted the page to a new layout at some point and forgot to remove the exclamation marks that I have previously added. If you know for sure the exclamation marks are wrong then remove them. I have got a manual somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment. Cheers, Mark.

Markhobley 22:38, 23 February 2013 (UTC)

No biggie; but it's a shame that you chose to use "!=" instead of "\=" as the NOT EQUAL operator. It's only that choice that stopped the program compiling directly to NetRexx too. That would have made this one of the few program examples in the REXX family to cross all dialects.

--Alansam 01:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)