[JimF]
Technically, this *is* a bug in ExtensionClass, however, Python *does* deserve some of the blame. The intepreter actually uses the following rule:
Instances of two different "python types" are not compared using type-supplied comparison methods unless:
- At least one of the types is InstanceType or
- Both of the types are numeric.
This rule is rather inconvenient for ExtensionClass. It's also pretty inconvenient for non-ExtensionClass non-numeric extension types that want to be comparable with other things.
You can work around this by making your ExtensionClass a numeric type. This should be possible by providing a numeric method.
Without having investigated all the details of this thread, I suspect that all of this ought to be rethought when we do rich comparisons and revamp coercions. I'd say that would be a good project for Python 2.1... (Which most of the Zopers probably still know as 1.7. :-) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://dinsdale.python.org/~guido/)