compare

(compare x y)

clojure.core/compare: a negative number, zero or a positive number as x sorts before, with or after y, the oracle's: nil before anything, numbers by value across their kinds ((compare 1 1.0) is 0), strings, keywords and symbols as Java's compareTo (the difference of the first characters that differ, a name without a namespace first), characters by their difference, false before true, vectors by length and then member by member. Two values of different kinds, or of a kind with no order (a list, a map, a set), signal. It is the order of sorted-map/sorted-set, and sort takes it as a comparator. Strings compare by code point, where the oracle compares UTF-16 units (they differ only past U+FFFF). As a value a two-argument function.