On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:32:53AM -0800, Michael Lazzaro wrote: > > On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, at 11:02 AM, Jonathan Scott Duff wrote: > >> So you can't set something to its type's own empty value, because it > >> will, by definition, thereafter return it's "overloaded" empty value, > >> <def>. > > > > Looks like a maintenance nightmare to me. > > Agreed, it's not pretty. The fundamental problem is that a primitive > like an C<int> simply cannot be undefined... there's no flag for that > (which is they're primitive.)
The solution I advocate is to allow even "primitive" types to hold undef. I don't have an implementation, but that's just a detail I'll leave to those actually doing the implementation :-) > A simple solution is perhaps to say that C<is default> can only be > applied to types that can be undef (scalar,ref,Int,Str...) and can't be > used on things that have no undefined state (bit,int,str...). That works too (probably better depending on who you ask :) -Scott -- Jonathan Scott Duff [EMAIL PROTECTED]
