On Apr 30, 2004, at 10:22 AM, Dan Sugalski wrote:
At 2:57 AM +1000 5/1/04, Andre Pang wrote:Of course Parrot should have a function to reinterpret something of a string type as raw binary data and vice versa, but don't mix binary data with strings: they are completely different types, and raw binary data should never be able to be put into a string register. Maybe some blurring of binary data/strings should happen at the Perl layer, but Parrot should keep them as distinct as possible, IMHO.
I'm trying to make sure that keeping them separate is possible, but it's important for everyone to remember that we're limited in what we can do.
Parrot *can't* dictate semantics. That's not what we get to do.
But your plan seems to be very much dictating semantics--treating a whole class of reasonable string operations as "in that case, punt and throw an exception".
That's why it's overridable. I fully expect most languages will do so by default, but the option to leave the exceptions on as a debugging aid.
And it's not clear that the semantics it is dictating in fact match any of the target languages (or in fact, any existing language at all). The at-runtime association of character set/encoding/language, and the semantics it implies, is what I'm referring to here.
Yep, but with the exceptions disabled things'll act the way they should. -- Dan
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