Re: OT: Language War (Re: "C" Manual)
on Wed, 02 Jan 2002 12:43:56AM -0800, Erik Steffl insinuated:
> Richard Cobbe wrote:
> >
> > Perl does have strong types, but they don't really correspond to the
> > types that most people are used to thinking of. Perl's types are
> >
> > * scalars (no real distinction between strings, numbers, and the
> > undefined value)
> > * lists
> > * hashes
> > * filehandles
> >
> > (I haven't really used Perl since Perl 4, so this list may not be
> > complete.)
>
> actually there is real distinction between string and number, it's
> just that it's internal only (perl stores numbers and strings
> differently, it also treats them differently).
>
[...]
>
> the point was that it's not a strong type system - by which I mean
> that you can assign pretty much any value to any l-value, no questions
> asked. You don't get segfault but you still get non-working program
> (e.g. when you mistakenly assing array to scalar, you get size of array
> in scalar).
agreed -- and not only that, but you have to be careful to be aware of
which type you're using in order to compare scalars and have it mean
anything -- numerical operators being the standard ==, !=, &c.;
whereas the equivalent string operators are 'eq', 'ne', &c. it still
doesn't segfault (which is beautiful, and was the point here, i know),
but it makes your program more non-functional than if it just treated
the values the same.
</nori>
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