I did a series about comparisons recently where I gave some guidelines about using the upcoming spaceship operator for three-way comparison. In particular, I pointed out a couple of flaws with the design as it is currently.

Well, now the proposals for the next C++ standardization meeting are here — almost 300 of them. And I’ve counted eleven of them that deal with the spaceship operator.

So let’s take a look and them and see whether they’ll fix any of the issues I’ve pointed out.

In order to sort a collection of elements you need to provide a sorting predicate that determines when one element is less than the other. This predicate must “induce a strict total ordering on the equivalence classes” according to cppreference. Wait, what?

The upcoming C++ spaceship operator implements a three-way comparison, i.e. it is a single function that can return the results of <, == and > combined. But related to it are terms like “strong equality” and “weak ordering” which are somewhat confusing if you don’t have the mathematical background.

So let’s untangle it: This series will explain both the mathematics behind equality and ordering, as well as give concrete guidelines for implementing the comparison operators and the spaceship operator.

To finish this series let’s talk about algorithms that require an ordering and how they can be implemented using three-way comparison.

In order to sort a collection of elements you need to provide a sorting predicate that determines when one element is less than the other. This predicate must “induce a strict total ordering on the equivalence classes” according to cppreference. Wait, what?

The upcoming C++ spaceship operator implements a three-way comparison, i.e. it is a single function that can return the results of <, == and > combined. But related to it are terms like “strong equality” and “weak ordering” which are somewhat confusing if you don’t have the mathematical background.

So let’s untangle it: This series will explain both the mathematics behind equality and ordering, as well as give concrete guidelines for implementing the comparison operators and the spaceship operator.

Now that we’ve covered both equivalence and ordering relations we can finally talk about the spaceship operator and three-way comparisons.

In order to sort a collection of elements you need to provide a sorting predicate that determines when one element is less than the other. This predicate must “induce a strict total ordering on the equivalence classes” according to cppreference. Wait, what?

The upcoming C++ spaceship operator implements a three way comparison, i.e. it is a single function that can return the results of <, == and > combined. But related to it are terms like “strong equality” and “weak ordering” which are somewhat confusing if you don’t have the mathematical background.

So let’s untangle it: This series will explain both the mathematics behind equality and ordering, as well as give concrete guidelines for implementing the comparison operators and the spaceship operator.

The previous part was very math heavy but necessary: It introduced the mathematical terminology for ordering relations. With that done we can finally talk about how it applies to C++.

In order to sort a collection of elements you need to provide a sorting predicate that determines when one element is less than the other. This predicate must “induce a strict total ordering on the equivalence classes” according to cppreference. Wait, what?

The upcoming C++ spaceship operator implements a three way comparison, i.e. it is a single function that can return the results of <, == and > combined. But related to it are terms like “strong equality” and “weak ordering” which are somewhat confusing if you don’t have the mathematical background.

So let’s untangle it: This series will explain both the mathematics behind equality and ordering, as well as give concrete guidelines for implementing the comparison operators and the spaceship operator.

This part covers the mathematics behind ordering relations. They are a lot more complicated than equivalence relations we’ve looked at before. As my blog posts are usually long anyway, I’ve decided to split it into two. So this part is only about the mathematics while the next part—already published—is about how they should be implemented in C++.