(Dang. Wordy post, and almost completely unrelated to my proposal.) > I guess I'd be in favor of it, but yet I'm not terribly excited about > it. I wonder why...
Casting is unfortunately an often useless and ill designed feature in Pike; that might account for some of the dispassion. You can only cast to primitive types, and value casts don't necessarily work, even if you know a value to be a string and want to cast it to an int, when declared a string|int. It's a system difficult to grow incrementally better too, unfortunately. Even though in some ways it's a syntactically very powerful operation on recursively casting a large data structure into another, using compound type casts like (array(string)). It just doesn't reach do all that much more, when you don't primarily work with primitive types. I'm not really bashing the lack of design in Pike; its evolved nature is what makes it good, too. But casts, at least to me, feel a bit like a dead end. The thought crept up on me after reading The Pinocchio Problem, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html -- while not technically dead code, pike and casting feels like it has hit an evolutionary dead end. Small convenience changes like the one suggested might be within reach, but order of magnitude improvements are out of reach. With a bit of luck I just might know too little of pike's internals to be right about this.
