Annoying behaviour of the != operator

[Rocco Moretti]

Jordan Rastrick wrote:

> Unless someone can explain some sort of problem that arises from having
> != take advantage of a __eq__ method where present, I'd suggest that it
> should do so in Python 2.5.

If you're serious about this proposal, please formalize it in a PEP.

Things to specify:

How extensive are these changes? Is it just !=, or if __eq__ is not 
defined, will it be equal to "not __ne__()"?  __lt__/__gt__? 
__le__/__ge__? Do you simulate __le__ with '__lt__ or __eq__'? How about 
__lt__ with '__le__ and __ne__'?


> I'd be surprised if such a change broke so much as a single line of
> existing Python code.

Well, since it currently raises an error when __ne__ is not defined, I'd 
say your right on that account. The only corner case is when people 
would rely on 'a != b' to be implicitly translated to 'b != a'. If 'a != 
b' gets translated to 'not a == b', this may change semantics if the two 
are not equivalent.