Deep Equality for Objects | Dataford Interview Questions

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Problem

PayPay India services may exchange nested JSON-like payloads representing payment requests or responses. Implement a function that determines whether two such values are deeply equal.

Two values are deeply equal when they have the same structure and equivalent contents at every nesting level. Dictionary key order does not matter, but list order does. Values with different types are not equal, so True must not equal 1.

Formal Specification

Implement deep_equal(a, b):

a and b are JSON-compatible values: None, booleans, numbers, strings, lists, or dictionaries with string keys.
Numbers may be integers or floating-point values, excluding NaN.
Return True if the values are deeply equal, otherwise return False.
The input contains no cyclic references.

Constraints

1 <= total number of nested values <= 10^5
Maximum nesting depth is 1000
Dictionary keys are unique strings
There are no cyclic references
Numbers exclude NaN

Function Signature

def deep_equal(a, b):