Subject: Re: MD5 in LISP and abstraction inversions
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 04:15:09 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3215132108468905@naggum.net>

* Bruce Hoult <bruce@hoult.org>
| No, there is a third possibility: i and 0 compare equal using "<"
| 
| e.g. you can define (a + bi) < (c + di) to be a < c.

  It may make sense to allow < to work on complex numbers whose imaginary
  part is zero.  Some implementations of complex numbers do not turn these
  into or consider them reals, but for all relevant purposes, they are.  If
  this is the case, then specifying that < is implementation-dependent is
  simply the wrong place to do it, because the implementation-dependency
  lies in whether a complex number with a zero imaginary part _is_ a real.

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