One Q related to day 13: was there ever a discussion of adding support for the spaceship operator &l...

# advent-of-code

[nkiesel]

One Q related to day 13: was there ever a discussion of adding support for the spaceship operator <=> for compareTo in Kotlin?

[Vampire]

Yes, just Google it

[Vampire]

For example first result: https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/why-doesnt-kotlin-provide-a-spaceship-operator/322

[nkiesel]

Searched in youtrack before asking, but yes, should have searched further. Sorry for the noise

[Vampire]

Don't worry. 🙂

[ephemient]

you can use compareTo as an infix function since Kotlin 1.6: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/KT-9730

[nkiesel]

yeah, I did that. But I had some code for AoC which contain like 10 calls of compareTo in 25 lines, so thought that <=> would just make it a bit prettier

[elizarov]

@nkiesel Something is clearly very non-optimal in your code. This kind of code would better be rewritten, new operators will not help here.

[nkiesel]

Code is at https://github.com/nkiesel/AdventOfCode_2022/blob/main/src/test/kotlin/Day13.kt if you want to take a peek. And assuming we would not use the symbols for the override, I have 6 invocations. Most are because I call other compareTo in my compareTo implementations

[nkiesel]

and yes, my code is clearly non-optimal...