Throw exceptions on nonsensical comparisons?

[nbruin]

It is impossible to have Python's universal comparison and have mathematically sound meaning to comparison. Transitivity and/or other properties have to cave at some point.

One example:

sage: L=[int(0),None,1,int(2),3]
sage: L.sort()
sage: L
[1, None, 0, 2, 3]
sage: L[0]<L[2]
False

Would it be at all feasible to throw exceptions on non-sensical comparisons, such as 1 > None ? ** instead of ^ seems pretty mild compared to this.

[robertwb]

What about 1 == None or 1 != None, should those throw errors as well? (They use the same code).

[craigcitro]

As Rob points out, there's really no way to do this cleanly. In particular, though, how often do you end up accidentally comparing an integer to something like None? It seems much better to have an occasional result that seems strange at first than to break Python conventions, and run into more serious problems because of it.

I'm closing this as invalid.