Record comparison special case

[keniwasa@my-deja.com]

I have a record made up of records in which only small parts (a few
fields) are usually significant.

The point is that I would like to compare two such records and determine
whether the parts that both records consider to be significant are the
same.  The easiest way I could see to handle this is to have an
"insignificant" value in every enumeration and have some "insignificant"
coding for real values, but that's not an option since the types cannot
be modified.

The records themselves that comprise my big record also cannot be
modified.

While I could have a boolean "significant" field associated with every
field of all my comprising records, it seems to me that there ought to
be a better way.

I'd like to store the 'Position and 'Size of the elements that I
consider significant into a queue which would be associated with a big
record, but I'm not exactly sure how I should go about doing the
comparison if I'm given only the big records and a list of 'Positions
and 'Sizes (other than having a huge case selection based on 'Position
which I would like to avoid).  I'm not even sure that 'Position will
give me the values I want as far as a direct bit comparison.

Thanks in advance,

Ken


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