On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 21:18 Trey Harris <t...@lopsa.org> wrote: > values, such as 'undefined' and 'Nil' as well as its type. > > And that’s another thing: you’ll notice if you define a `my uint8 $x;` it will be set to 0. No undefined, no Nil. That doesn’t happen with non-native numeric values.
> Nope. If I give you: > > 0x41 > > and tell you that’s a single octet, and that’s all you have, and I and ask > you whether that’s an “A” or a decimal 97 or something else described by > 01000001, how do you answer? You can’t. > > Raku knows at compile time—otherwise, it couldn’t autobox into an ‘Int’ > vs. a ‘Real’ for an int32 vs. a num32, for example—but that’s not currently > exposed to the runtime; you can pitch a new feature, but it would be > necessary to know what one would use it for to design an interface for it. > > An ability to cause a failure or exception to be thrown if a given value > is autoboxed would be much more defensible, I think—“I need to ensure this > thing doesn’t get munged by something unexpected into a form that my native > call will barf at” seems more reasonable (though unboxing should prevent > that in cases where you’re not round-tripping outside of Raku before your > native call). >
