"This still feels like a crazy abstraction. If two mutable objects look the same I want equality to say they are the same by default, not go into contortions to cover its ass because I might choose to mutate them and I might then care about reference equality."
Then make the objects immutable. Then equal makes sense. Then the compiler/interpreter knows what your intent is. Then you avoid all these issues. Then you don't even need a distinction between eq/equal: you can just use egal.
This seems to me to be the obvious choice, but it seems we disagree.
Yeah, I didn't fully understand egal when I said I agreed with it if the language distinguishes immutable objects. I want my equality to be more lenient in comparing mutable objects. Even with mutable objects it seems a lot more common that I just care about structural equality rather than identity.
