Nevin Liber <nevin_at_[hidden]> writes:

[...]

| And in a simpler world, both the novice solution and the expert solution ought
| to match...

Well, "experts" would not be "experts" if they are undistinguishable
from novices. <g>

We may be on a side track here. If your argument is that putting stuff
in ordered associative containers requires an ordering, then the natural
thing to do is to have a mechanism to automatically generate a default
"natural" ordering.
Making operator< on pointers a total order does not solve that. It
isn't a strech of imagination that they would want to put
std::complex<T> in associative containers too. Novices would still have
to write codes with subtle deficienties.

Note: I am trying to make sure that we understand changes with potentially far
reaching consequences, and not just focus on a possibly incomplete patch
with narrow justification. At the end of the day, someone is going to
stand in front of SG12 and WG21 and get stoned forever, and that is
likely to be me :-) So if you argue one side, I would argue the other
for the purpose understanding and documentation of design choice --
there is no One Right Answer; it is engineering.

-- Gaby