<=>(other) public

Compare this date with another date.

other can also be a Numeric value, in which case it is interpreted as an Astronomical Julian Day Number.

Comparison is by Astronomical Julian Day Number, including fractional days. This means that both the time and the timezone offset are taken into account when comparing two DateTime instances. When comparing a DateTime instance with a Date instance, the time of the latter will be considered as falling on midnight UTC.

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March 12, 2009
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Comparing Date with Numeric in mixed sort

While:

Date#<=>(other)

can accept a Numeric object as other, the reverse is not true:

Numeric#<=>(other)

cannot accept a Date object as other.

So if you are sorting a list containing a mix of dates and numbers, you can get different results depending on the starting order!

a = Date.parse("2008-01-01")
b = Date.parse("2009-10-22")
c = Date.parse("2005-01-04")
d = 0

[a,b,c,d].sort #=> [0, Tue, 04 Jan 2005, Tue, 01 Jan 2008, Thu, 22 Oct 2009]

[b,c,d,a].sort #=> ArgumentError: comparison of Fixnum with Date failed