Re: another take on hackers and painters

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 3:25 PM -0500 5/21/03, mcguire@cs.utexas.edu wrote:
>Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> wrote:
>  >[...] and both sides *are* numbers, after all. Why not coerce to types
>  >based on value? Seems the logical extension to dynamic typing to me.
>
>What about 1 + "three"?  :-)

I'd generally not consider that a number, for two reasons:

1) There are all sorts of localization issues--"three" doesn't mean 
much in Taipei.
2) If the parser saw 1 + three in the code stream it wouldn't do the 
math, so I'd generally assume that 1 + "three" wouldn't either.

Both statements are language-local--I wouldn't be surprised to find a 
language that allowed "three" either as a string constant or bareword 
to translate to the number three. I'd expect it wouldn't be as useful 
a feature as the more simplistic "if it looks like a number to the 
parser, it looks like a number at runtime" rule, but I've not had 
reason to deal with a language that does get fancy, so it might be 
useful.

Someone sent me private mail that boiled down to "Well, should 1 + '2 
* 5' evaluate to 11, then?" which is a separate albeit related 
question--should variables with strings in them interpolate at 
runtime and be evaluated, either in full or limited form? And, 
well... I've used languages like that (DCL, anyone?) and it's 
actually quite useful, but that's a case where caution would argue 
against it without extra notation. Evaluating "3" as 3 is one thing, 
and the worst-case failure mode is reasonably harmless if it's really 
wrong. Doing a full eval would make 1 + foo rather nasty if foo 
happened to have the string "system('rm -rf /')" in it.

Still, it's all points in an n-dimensional continuum. Different tools 
for different jobs, and all that.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk