[08:21:56] <wm-bb>	 <Al> What’s the thinking on type conversion? Is it always explicit by means of a function call? Suppose, for example, that we have a type for “English compound-noun lexeme” and a list of values of that type. Would we need to convert the list to a list of strings before we could sort it and then convert the sorted result back into a list of the original type?
[12:23:48] <wm-bb>	 <mahir256> I wonder if that is inefficient compared to having a generic sort function to which one could provide a comparison operator
[14:28:01] <wm-bb>	 <Al> Could be. If I understand https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Generic_function_type correctly, the “comparison operator” would be a function with type-specific arguments and a Boolean return type. I doubt we would want to be defining a new comparison function every time we define a new type.
[14:31:00] <wm-bb>	 <mahir256> without a comparison operator how else do you impose a (partial) order on values of a type if it's not guaranteed to inherit--or rather, since there is no type inheritance, will not inherit--from a type that does?
[14:38:18] <wm-bb>	 <Al> Beats me. Hence my original question.