the same). which may be either shallow (testing only immediate subparts), or deep (testing for equality of subparts recursively). A simple way to achieve this is through representational equality: checking that the values have the same representation. Some other tailor-made equality, preserving the external behavior. For example, 1/2 and 2/4 are considered equal when seen as a rational number. A possible requirement would be that "A = B if and only if all operations on objects A and B will have the same result", in addition to reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity. The first type of equality usually implies the second (except for things like not a number (NaN) which are unequal to themselves), but the converse is not necessarily true. For example, two string objects may be distinct objects (unequal in the first sense) but contain the same sequence of characters (equal in the second sense). See identity for more of this issue. Real numbers, including many simple fractions, cannot be represented exactly in floating-point arithmetic, and it may be necessary to test for equality within a given tolerance. Such tolerance, however, can easily break desired properties such as transitivity, whereas reflexivity breaks too: the IEEE floating-point standard requires that NaN ≠ NaN holds. In contrast, the (2022) private standard for posit arithmetic (posit proponents mean to replace IEEE floats) has a similar concept, NaR (Not a Real), where NaR = NaR holds. Other programming elements such as computable functions, may either have no sense of equality, or an equality that is uncomputable. For these reasons, some languages define an explicit notion of "comparable", in the form of a base class, an interface, a trait or a protocol, which is used either explicitly, by declaration in source code, or implicitly, via the structure of the type involved. Comparing values of different types In JavaScript, PHP, VBScript and a few other dynamically typed languages, the standard equality operator evaluates to true if two values are equal, even if they have different types, making the number 4 compare equal to the text string "4", for instance. A typed equality operator is often available also, in such languages, returning true only for values with identical or equivalent types (in PHP, 4 === "4" is false although 4 == "4" is true). For languages where the number 0 may be interpreted as false, this operator may simplify things such as checking for zero (as