Re: [cdr-discuss] AEQUALIS and COMPARE

On 15 Feb 2011, at 14:36, Attila Lendvai wrote:

...

• The idea that COMPARE returns symbols also seems weird to me. Wouldn't it be better to return numbers (-1, 0, +1 or NIL)? Can't immediately tell why, though.

you need to return well-known identities that communicate the result. -1,0,+1 are the easy way for well-known identities in C. in CL, symbols provide a much nicer framework to deal with well-known identities IMO.

I guess my main reason for suggesting fixnums as return values here is that they are easier to use for table lookups. Not sure if that's very relevant, though...

(svref some-table (1+ (compare this that)))

Pascal