On 26 August 2013 11:00, Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin@google.com> wrote:

Could someone explain why we need to allow operator<(T*) to be a non-order?

It comes from C.  I believe it comes from the days of segmented architectures.

I do not know of any modern machines that have such architectures and have C++11 compilers for them.  Whenever it comes up for discussion on various reflectors, no one has mentioned one either.  I for one would like to see this restriction go away.

Armchair thought:  maybe we should propose a total ordering for pointers (for C++17 at this point) and see if anyone objects?

All that being said, I believe Library is inconsistent in its use of operator< vs. std::less<T>, and that needs to be addressed separately.  Pointers are the current poster child for the issue but user code might be specializing std::less as well.

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 Nevin ":-)" Liber  <mailto:nevin@eviloverlord.com>  (847) 691-1404