2010/3/26 Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@canterbury.ac.nz>:
Eiffel even seems to extend this to conversions, so that if you convert an int to a float, the resulting float should compare equal to the original int, even if some precision was lost in the conversion.
Such equality is not transitive (unless 1000000000 and 1000000001 are equal as ints which would be nonsense). The original problem with NaN is a consequence of an unfortunate decision to unify numeric equality with object equivalence. If they were distinguished, their behavior would be obvious: NaN != NaN NaN eq NaN 0.0 == -0.0 0.0 ne -0.0 42 == 42.0 42 ne 42.0 Hash tables would use object equivalence of course. If you have a type for a time which includes the local time and the time zone, and < > <= >= compare which time is earlier, then numeric == should be true for times denoting the same time through different time zones, but they should not be equivalent. Lisp and Scheme distinguish these relations. -- Marcin Kowalczyk