On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 07:47:23PM +0100, Alex Baretta wrote:
> Pervasives.compare currently returns an int. Intuitively it would be 
> more appropriate for it to return a union type such as the following.
> 
> type comparison_result = Less | Equals | Greater
> 
> What are the reasons behind the present design choice?

Wouldn't it be for speed?  You could define Pervasives.compare over
integers just as a subtraction.  For strings, you can write a loop
which looks character-by-character over the strings, subtracting one
character from another, and if the result is non-zero, return that
result directly (else keep iterating).

Rich.

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Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
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