On Mon, 18 Dec 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Dec 17, 2006, at 1:36 AM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
That's aiming low. Why shouldn't there be any automatic casts between the
two?
Automatic type conversion sounds like a really bad idea if the language only
partially supports it.
If that's the case then pd is a really bad idea.
It's not possible to typecast any value of a type to any value of another
type, all of the time. That's even true in the most typecast-frenzy
languages ever.
There's no such requirement that implicit casts have to be impossibly well
supported in order to be a good idea. You're just dismissing all forms of
implicit casts as being bad ideas.
Pd is strongly typed, so what Martin says is definitely appropriate.
Non-sequitur, there are languages that have quite strict and elaborate
type checking and yet which support implicit casts. For example, C++.
And then, in many cases, languages can become less strictly checked
without any problems, as long as nothing actually relies on type
violations. Because pd doesn't have any error handling (in the sense of pd
patches being able to figure out their own problems), if any patch doesn't
spit out any error messages, it would run the same if there were more
implicit casts made, because the patches would never trigger those
implicit casts anyway.
Perl is the opposite, everything can be automatically cast, so there it
makes sense.
No, in Perl there's no way that you can cast something to a pointer. You
can use the backslash operator to make a pointer to anything, but
that's not a cast-to-pointer, because if you use it on a pointer, you
don't get the same pointer, you get a new pointer.
So... anyone want to code up some of these ideas? We could try them out
in the next Pd-extended.
Martin's solution, my solution, or your solution?
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada
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