On 2018-09-06 18:21, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
Yeah. IMO automatic type conversion is one of the failure points of the xtalk paradigm, but it's always been thus.
To be fair, in the days of HyperCard when everything was strings (and numbers were decimal strings) the rules worked absolutely fine I think.
However, the use of doubles as the internal rep for numbers, and introduction of arrays broke a few invariants a consistent implementation of the above view relies upon - hence the annoying points of friction.
I don't think implicit type conversion is the problem per-se - just the precise details of what gets converted to what, and the inability to say 'at this point, this needs to actually be a <foo>'.
If you want to be abstract about it then you can view a programming language as a compression algorithm - it is a way to express a set of possible outcomes in a linear sequence of text. With that point of view, they suffer exactly the same problem as any compression algorithm suffers - all compression algorithms will expand some input.
i.e. What you might gain in some places in terms of ease / clarity / ability; you will lose elsewhere - the hard bit is making sure that such cases are 'edge' cases and easily avoided.
Warmest Regards, Mark. -- Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/ LiveCode: Everyone can create apps _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
