Setting the Comparison Value For All __lt__, __gt__, __eq__, etc?

Question

Is it possible to set the comparison value for all comparison operations?

I've done something like this:

@dataclass
class _Leaf(Generic[T]):
    parent: _Leaf
    value: T

    def __init__(self, value: Optional[T] = None):
        self.value = value
        self.parent = self

    def update(self, value: T):
        self.value = value
        return self

    def __lt__(self, other: _Leaf):
        return repr(self) < repr(other)

    def __gt__(self, other: _Leaf):
        return repr(self) > repr(other)

    def __eq__(self, other: _Leaf):
        return repr(self) == repr(other)

    def __repr__(self):
        return self.value

But this is more of a convention rather than something built into python and I later found that this does not work when I want to compare tuples. I could come up with a __val__ of my own and use that but I don't want to add functionality if it already exists. Is there something like my proposed __val__ that I can use?

@dataclass
class _Leaf(Generic[T]):
    parent: _Leaf
    value: T

    def __init__(self, value: Optional[T] = None):
        self.value = value
        self.parent = self

    def update(self, value: T):
        self.value = value
        return self

    def __val__(self):
        return self.value

Answer 1

There is no such thing as a protocol, supporing a generic __val__ method. You can either cast your class to a comparable type by implementing the respective protocol function, iff applicable, such as __float__, __int__ and compare the casted values via int(obj) <= int(other) instead.

If you need custom functions to compare your objects in other manners, have a look at functools.total_ordering().

Answer 2

The functools module has a decorator called total_ordering that almost exactly does that for you. You just have to define one of the comparison operators and ideally the __eq__ operator and the rest will be derived from those.