[mehrdadn]

> I don't think it makes sense to talk about the minimum person of the group; minimum/maximum imply that it's the thing itself which is ordered.

Uh, it totally makes sense, I just gave you a string example too. The comparator doesn't have to distinguish unequal elements, and a min (and argmin and sort et al.) is perfectly fine and sensible with such a comparator.

Do you code in Python at all? Do you find the fact that 1.0 and 1 are both simultaneously equal in some sense and unequal in another sense to be just complete nonsense? Do you expect min(1.0, 1) to error...? Or for sorted([1.0, 1]) to return [1, 1] just because the elements are "equal" so obviously what right do you have to care which one is returned?

[lmm]

> Uh, it totally makes sense, I just gave you a string example too. The comparator doesn't have to distinguish unequal elements, and a min (and argmin and sort et al.) is perfectly fine and sensible with such a comparator.

Sorting is not the same thing as taking the minimum.

> Do you code in Python at all? Do you find the fact that 1.0 and 1 are both simultaneously equal in some sense and unequal in another sense to be just complete nonsense? Do you expect min(1.0, 1) to error...?

Yes, and this is a large reason why I prefer to work in languages that let me manage such distinctions more carefully.