Jonathan Turkanis wrote:
However, if you accept that comparisons criteria are alway contextual, I think you must conclude that the comparison operators <, <=, etc. are completely useless. On the contrary, I like the ability to have a default comparison criteria that works a good deal of the time;
Agree.
as long as it's provided, it should be customizable.
Disagree. Your own logic doesn't support this conclusion: a default comparison works most of the time, therefore, it doesn't need to be customizable, because you could only customize it to _not work_ most of the time. And for the string case, the downside to encoding a comparison in the type is that you'll now spend a lot of time converting strings (because most libraries - correctly - accept an ordinary std::string, regardless of what comparisons they might make underneath, or they'd expose implementation details in the interface.) Nobody uses anything but std::string and std::wstring. ;-)