Discussion Thread: DIP 1042--ProtoObject--Community Review Round 1

[Dom DiSc]

On Friday, 14 January 2022 at 03:41:49 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> No, they are not inherently orderable, the orderings you 
> mentions are external orders imposed on them.
Nothing is inherently ordered. The order is always some new 
property given to the object in question. Numbers are nothing 
then a (unordered) set plus an order given to them (an axiom on 
its own). The order is never "inherent" and there are always 
endless different ways to assign an order to a set of objects.
The important part is: it is mostly useful to do so (assigning a 
specific order to a set of objects), thereby making from a set an 
ordered set.
And especially on computers a set always need at least some 
"default" order (e.g. address), otherwise you cannot access its 
elements.
But I agree that it is useful to have a way to assign some 
predicate to a class by which its instances should be ordered (at 
least if you don't like the default order: the memory address 
where it is stored), but that need not be a member function, so I 
omitted it.