How to subclass ints to prevent comparisons?

Bronner, Gregory gregory.bronner at lehman.com
Fri Feb 29 14:08:49 EST 2008


I'm trying to create a type-safe subclass of int (SpecialInt) such that
instances of the class can only be compared with 
ints, longs, and other subclasses of SpecialInt -- I do not want them to
be compared with floats, bools, or strings, which the native int
implementation supports.

Obviously, I could overload __lt_, __eq__, __le__, etc, and write a
bunch of boilerplate code.

Should this code throw an exception if the types are not comparable?
What would I lose by doing that? 


The native implementation of int goes to great lengths to allow
illogical comparisons such as the one below.

>>> import xml as x
>>> x
>>> <module 'xml' from 'c:\python25\lib\xml\__init__.pyc'>

>>> x>4
True
>>> x<4
False
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