Yesterday, we were bitten quite badly by a rude surprise where OCaml
behaved in a rather different way from what we would have expected:

===>

compare "cat" "dog";; (* gives -1, just as strcmp would do *)

compare "def" "abcde";; (* gives 1, again, as expected *)

compare (1,5) (1,7);;  (* gives -1, comparison seems to be
			  lexicographic on containers... *)

compare [|1;2;3|] [|4;5|];; (* ...but actially is not: this gives 1,
			       supposedly because the second list is
			       shorter than the first.
			    *)

compare ((17,23),[|8;9;10|]) ((12,21),[|8;9|]);;

(* This situation is quite similar to the one where encountered
    the problem. We tried to use Array.sort in conjunction with
    "compare" to sort some abstract specifications of contributions
    to a sparse matrix of the form ((row,column),array_of_factors)
    by row, assuming that "compare" would do the job through
    lexicographical order, but actually, it does not. In this case,
    the result is +1 rather than -1!
*)

compare ((17,23),[8;9;10]) ((12,21),[8;9]);;

(* Interestingly, this also gives +1, so using "compare" and replacing
    arrays by lists commutes. This is rather strange, as walking a list
    to determine its length certainly is more effort than implementing
    lexicographical comparison...
*)

<===

Let us see for comparison how other H.M.-typed languages behave:
Haskell (hugs):

Haskell 98 mode: Restart with command line option -98 to enable extensions

Type :? for help
Hugs.Base> ((17,23),[8,9,10]) < ((12,21),[8,9])
False
Hugs.Base>

...just as about everybody would expect.

SML, by the way, does not seem to extend ">" to container types.

I think it would be a *very* good idea to provide
compare_lexicographically in addition to compare as a pre-defined built-in,
as this is (1) what many people want to do, (2) it cannot be implemented
without resorting to either C or black magic, and (3) it would not change
the behaviour of already existing code that uses "compare".

-- 
best regards,
Thomas Fischbacher
t.fischbacher@soton.ac.uk