add a way to turn on objectEquality for internal watches from a directive or expression.

[funkjunky]

I have to clone all my array every time I add or remove an element, because I have a textarea that has it's ng-model set to that array and it compares the arrays by reference.

There doesn't appear any way for me to tell the ng-model to use objectEquality, short of rewriting the ng-model directive.

(anyone wondering why I have an array set for the ng-model, it's because I convert from array to text and back to array again using a custom directive [and no, ng-list is not powerful enough for my use case (unless ngList can use regex to compress a list into a tally of items)])

[IgorMinar]

We are not considering exposing objectEquality via directive api because deep watching is an easy performance trap.

In your case, you don't actually want to deep watch, but use watchCollection instead, which ngModel doesn't support right now.

this in fact affects ngList as well, which doesn't see updates done to the array without array identity changes: http://plnkr.co/edit/HDpJNYd1LVUxqnVhnz7X?p=preview

[IgorMinar]

I'm closing this in favor of #8326