[Grace-core] On numbers and objects

[James Noble]

> I thought that the whole point of using egal was that it was  
> DIFFERENT from pointer equality, which is what most old timers will  
> think when they see ==.   Maybe I'm missing your idea.

egal is pointer equality for mutable objects
structural equality for immutable objects

>   Perhaps a blog post on equality is in order?

indeed it is!

in fact there is topic queued up there already - with no text
(as he goes to edit the blog to introduce a new one)

> I don't really care what we use for comments -- and I don't see the  
> need for two kinds, either.  I imagine that I will be writing and  
> reading comments in an IDE, which will render them in grey italics  
> in balloons on hover, so the ASCII symbol will be irrelevant to me.

sure. but we still need an exchange syntax, a presentation syntax,
and something (novices especially) can type in from a "book"
or copy from a web page or a blog. Sometimes those things
will need comments - and you'll still have to do something
(perhaps in the IDE) to create your hover box comments too.

Oh - and also making it easy to "comment out code"
when debugging or hacking...

Again, I think the interesting issue here is how to support other
metadata annnotations - we'll probably want that as well eventually,
and a comment can be seen as the most basic  (unstructred) annotation.

>  So, on reflection, || is a nice operator, and we should save it for  
> that.

fair enough!

James