JuliaLang/julia — comment on commit 9173a3ea4b1baf233bf8f321c5e2e0659781dba1
File:  line 0
By StefanKarpinski:

I don't think so. This is actually *just* for sorting. Just like `isequal` is for hashing, but defaults to `==` for numerics and `is` for non-numerics, we need to provide a hook method so that types can override their sorting behavior while having more intuitive normal behavior for `<`. Floating-point values are an example of needing this, not entirely sure if there are others. I'm not sure if it's possible to rewrite all the sorting code so that it only uses strict comparisons. Any idea about that? Otherwise, we'll need to have something like `sortlt` and `sortle` which default to `<` and `<=`, respectively.