I implemented this locally and the idea works pretty well for the most part.
We still need to do toString() when possible because of edge cases.
For example: stringFromXmlList1 == stringFromXmlList2 fails because the
Javascript engine does not try to convert them (correctly) to primitive values.
On Aug 5, 2016, at 11:59 AM, Harbs <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I’m thinking that I should implement valueOf() for XML like this:
> var str:String = this.toString();
> var asInt:int = parseInt(str);
> if(asInt.toString() == str)
> return asInt;
>
> var asFloat:Number = parseFloat(str);
> if(asFloat.toString() == str)
> return asFloat;
>
> return str;
>
> This would make XML work natively with primitives in most cases even if we
> can’t infer types:
>
> var xml:XML = <xml name”Fred” value=“10”/>;
> var name:* = xml.@name;
> var value:* = xml.@value;
>
> trace(value+5)//15
> trace(name+ “ Flintstone”); //Fred Flintstone
> trace(“10”+value)//“1010”
> trace(value+value)//20
>
> This will not work if we’re expecting a valid number to actually be a string.
> We could end up with arithmetic instead of string concatenation.
>
> It will also not allow things like:
> name.toLowerCase()// error
> name.split(“”);//error
>
> One hack we could do would be to add all string and number methods to XML and
> XMLLIst which would essentially call toString(). Something like this:
>
> public function
> split(separator:*=undefined,limit:int=Number.POSITIVE_INFINITY):Array
> {
> this.toString.split(separator,limit);
> }
>
> That would let XML act as if it’s a string (and number) in most cases.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> On Aug 4, 2016, at 5:33 PM, Alex Harui <aha...@adobe.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 8/4/16, 7:22 AM, "Harbs" <harbs.li...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I’m not sure how to deal with this case:
>>>
>>>
>>> private var name:String;
>>>
>>> this.name = someXML.@Name;
>>>
>>> The above compiles to
>>>
>>> this.name = someXML.attribute('Name’);
>>>
>>> In Javascript this.name becomes an XMLList, but in Flash, the XMLList is
>>> implicitly converted to a string.
>>>
>>> Is it possible to make the compiler smarter and make the compiled version
>>> look like this?
>>>
>>> this.name = someXML.attribute('Name’).toString();
>>
>> I will look into it.
>>
>> -Alex
>>
>
