Object Disequality Block

Object Disequality Block

Where Is It?

The object disequality block is located in the Objects drawer of the Blawx toolbox.

What Does It Do?

The object disequality block is used to check that two objects are not the same object.

Technical Details

The object disequlaity block is a statement, and can be stacked with other statements.

It expects two inputs, both of which need to be objects or variables.

When used in a question, or in the conditions of a rule or constraint, the block is true only if the things referred to are not identical. Two objects are identical if they are literally the same object (i.e. "bob is the same object as bob"), or if an object equality block has declared them to be identical (i.e. "bob is the same object as robert").

Tips

Object disequality blocks are very useful when you have a rule that is dealing with more than one object in the same category, and you need to know that they are different objects.

This happens quite frequently.

For example, the definition of a "sibling" is "a person who shares parents with another person". Implicitly, it is understood that the reference to "a person" and the reference to "another person" exclude the possibility that the two people are the same person.

In Blawx, you might use "Person" and "Other_Person" as the names of the variables. If you do, Blawx will make sure that every reference to "Person" is a reference to the same object, and every reference to "Other_Person" is a reference to the same object. But Blawx will not automatically ensure that "Person" and "Other_Person" refer to different objects, merely because you gave them different names.

That's where the object disequality block is useful. In Blawx, the definition of "sibling" might be a rule that says:

When we know:
(Person) has a parent (Parent)
(Other_Person) has a parent (Parent)
(Person) is not the same object as (Other_Person) <- object disequality block
We also know:
(Person) is a sibling of (Other_Person)

Without the object disequality, that rule would conclude that everyone was their own sibling.