[JoeAltmaier]

Only if you do it that way. Make it MatchForParticularPurpose(v1, v2) instead, and voila no leak.

Operators are unique in the language. They hold a special place. They deliberately are written to imply something we already understand. No fair lumping them in with every other attribute or method of an encapsulated type.

Intuition is a very, very poor thing to depend upon in a programming language. I disagree heartily that it should be the solution to disambiguating any operation.

[msbarnett]

> Only if you do it that way. Make it MatchForParticularPurpose(v1, v2) instead, and voila no leak.

Making the name more opaque won't save you at all. You're making what should be a local detail -- how your type implements equality -- into something that only works when it is global knowledge.

Consequently, your type is brittle and incomposable with types that aren't infected with this knowledge:

    [instance11, instance2, instance3].sort

won't do anything sensible until we infect either the Array type or the call site with non-local knowledge about your type.

Every type you build in this manner will find knowledge about itself diffusing throughout your application, like children peeing in a pool. Composition will be limited, inflexible, and require manual insertion of type-specific knowledge, because you have failed to encapsulate knowledge about equality.

Everything needs to know about everything else, and in the end you've built a tightly coupled ball of mud.

[cdcarter]

> Operators are unique in the language. They hold a special place. They deliberately are written to imply something we already understand. No fair lumping them in with every other attribute or method of an encapsulated type.

I would argue that a CORE value of Ruby is that everything is an object, and objects communication by message passing. Treating an operator as anything other than a message between objects is fundamentally wrong.

If you expect operators to do anything other than call the appropriate message on an object, you're misunderstanding the syntax.

[msbarnett]

Indeed, in a very real sense Ruby simply doesn't have "syntactic operators" in the C-ish sense he seems to regard them.

Ruby only has messages. Some of those messages just happen to have punctuation for names.