Even eq? foo.eq(null) flows a lot less well than foo eq null to my eye. (Personally, I find the StringBuilder append a lot clearer infix too, but maybe I'm weird that way.)

@Ichoran

Sorry, merged to eagerly :)

(Personally, I find the StringBuilder append a lot clearer infix too, but maybe I'm weird that way.)

You are not weird, I agree that sb append("<!ELEMENT ") append(name) append(' ') looks cleaner than sb.append("<!ELEMENT ").append(name).append(' '); but to me s"<!ELEMENT $name " looks cleaner still. Maybe #673 alleviates some of the damage to readability...

Even eq? foo.eq(null) flows a lot less well than foo eq null to my eye.

While I prefer a.equals(b) to a equals b, I agree that a eq b looks better than a.eq(b)... The goal of this pull request was not to codify my aesthetics though - it was to eliminate any and all infix method invocations, since they are no longer recommended and will eventually become illegal (although it'll be years before that affects us here).

I did not look into changing the code to use different methods on case-by-case basis as part of this pull request, but doing this should alleviate some of the readability issues; for instance, 9 out of 10 occurrences of a.ne(b) in the code are actually of the form a.ne(null) and could be replaced with the very readable a != null, couldn't they? Needless to say, your contributions in this or any other area are more than welcome :)