Announcing E 0.8.4: The Birthday Release

[Mark S. Miller]

>On Fri, 28 May 1999, Mark S. Miller wrote:
>> 	x |=| y
>> 
>> meaning that x and y are equivalent in their natural partial ordering.
>> This is a peer to <, <=, >=, and >.  Think of 'x |=| y' as 'x <= y && 
>> x >= y'.

At 10:16 AM 5/28/99 , Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>[#] How about <=> instead, to make more obvious their kinship?
>Pipe characters don't appear in any of the other operators in
>this family, and <=> is a clearer mnemonic for <= && =>.


[+] I originally rejected this for a bogus reason.

It was one of the alternatives I'd originally considered, but thinking back 
I see that my reason for rejecting this was stupid.  I remembered the old 
Basic not equals operator, "<>", which means "less than *or* greater than".  
Similarly, "<=" means "less than *or* equals", so I thought people would 
assume "<=>" means "less than, equal to, or greater than", ie, comparable to.

Now that you've raised it, it's clear to me that people will instead assume 
only that it's a comparison operator, but know they don't know what it means 
until they find out.  Once they do find out, it's easily memorable by its 
place in the following sequence:

		<  <=  <=>  >=  >

I will add this in 0.8.5, and deprecate |=|.  In 0.8.6, I will remove |=|.


	Cheers,
	--MarkM