From: Michael Neumann <neumann@...>
Date: 2001-12-11T21:49:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28208] Re: The benefits of dynamic typing?

Mark Hahn wrote:
> 
> I think that most in the Ruby community have the same feelings towards
> static typing.
> 
> Recently, I lost an argument to several people in the community on this
> mailing list.  I was proposing that string concatenation should work with
> any object.  So "1" + 1 ==> "11".  This is how Java works.  I found it very
> useful and used it constantly.  I use it right now in ruby constantly (but I
> have to add .to_s all over the place).
> 
> The reason I lost the argument was that they claimed it would cause
> hard-to-find bugs if someone meant: "1".to_int + 1.  They claimed it was
> ambiguous.  To me it is obvious that "1"+1 means a string and 1+"1" means an
> integer (because of message passing).

What about:

  "1#{ 1 }" ???

Ok, it's less readable.

Regards,

  Michael


-- 
Michael Neumann
merlin.zwo InfoDesign GmbH
http://www.merlin-zwo.de