Spaceship Operator
森建
moriken at kimamass.com
Tue Jun 27 20:07:51 UTC 2017
PHP, Ruby, Groovy have spaceship operator `<=>`. In short, this operator compares values and returns `1`, `-1`, `0`.
ECMAScript spec's `TypedArray#sort` has the default comparison part like following code, so I think it's useful that appending spaceship operator to ECMAScript like it.
http://www.ecma-international.org/ecma-262/8.0/#sec-%typedarray%.prototype.sort
```javascript
function isPlusZero(val) {
return val === 0 && 1 / val === Infinity;
}
function defaultCompare(x, y) {
const [isNaN_x, isNaN_y] = [Number.isNaN(x), Number.isNaN(y)];
if(isNaN_x && isNaN_y)
return 0;
if(isNaN_x)
return 1;
if(isNaN_y)
return -1;
if(x < y)
return -1;
if(x > y)
return 1;
if(x === 0 && y === 0) {
const [isPlusZero_x, isPlusZero_y] = [isPlusZero(x), isPlusZero(y)];
if(!isPlusZero_x && isPlusZero_y)
return -1;
if(isPlusZero_x && !isPlusZero_y)
return 1;
}
return 0;
}
```
```javascript
// NaN behave like the biggest number
NaN <=> NaN // 0
NaN <=> 42 // 1
42 <=> NaN // -1
Infinity <=> NaN // -1
// finite
10 <=> 10 // 0
-1 <=> 10 // -1
10 <=> -1 // 1
// 0, -0 are not the same
-0 <=> 0 // -1
0 <=> -0 // 1
```
## Use cases
```javascript
// Array#sort can use TypedArray#sort default comparison part
[10, 5, NaN, -1].sort((a, b) => a <=> b); // [-1, 5, 10, NaN]
// desc order
new Float64Array([10, 5, NaN, -1]).sort((a, b) => -(a <=> b)); // [NaN, 10, 5, -1]
```
## Problems
`TypedArray#sort` default comparison part has no `string` order function.
```javascript
"abc" <=> "def" // same as "abc".localeCompare("def") ?
"abc" <=> 42 // same as "abc".localeCompare("42") ?
```
I found the reference to spaceship operator in ES Discuss. It has Already discussed in TC39 meeting?
https://esdiscuss.org/topic/informative-notes#content-3
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