replace 'smaller', 'larger', 'equal' with 'Comparison.smaller', 'Comparison.larger', 'Comparison.equal'

I’ve always hated that the cases of Comparison (smaller, larger, equal) pollute the toplevel namespace of ceylon.language.

I could change the definition of Comparison to this:

"The result of a comparison between two [[Comparable]]
 objects: [[larger]], [[smaller]], or [[equal]]."
see (interface Comparable)
tagged("Comparisons")
shared class Comparison
        of larger | smaller | equal {

    shared actual String string;

    "The value is exactly equal to the given value."
    shared new equal {
        string => "equal";
    }

    "The value is smaller than the given value."
    shared new smaller {
        string => "smaller";
    }

    "The value is larger than the given value."
    shared new larger {
        string => "larger";
    }

    "The reversed value of this comparison."
    since("1.2.0")
    shared Comparison reversed
        => switch (this)
        case (equal) this
        case (larger) smaller
        case (smaller) larger;

}

So you would write Comparison.smaller, Comparison.larger, Comparison.equal.

This would be a breaking change, of course.

WDYT, folks?

[jvasileff]

Not a big deal either way, but I like them being toplevels; less hassle and clutter with imports.

Is there any practical benefit to requiring the import?

What has really bugged me is the top-level function smallest(), which is ungrammatical for smaller(). If we’re going to change things up, I think it would be worth exploring other words to resolve the overload, like lesser and greater.

[gavinking]

You can try this out on the 7409 branch.