[Swift-devel] numeric type(s) in swift.

[Ben Clifford]

On Fri, 20 Jul 2007, Mike Wilde wrote:

> Is there any app-based request in bugzilla right now that demands a more
> immediate resolution of this issue?

its more that it comes from me trying to do the bug 30 rewrite of the 
intermediate format - every bug that depends on that has a workaround 
being used by apps as they encounter them, however its a serious usability 
problem in terms of people writing code they think will work and finding 
it doesn't (and worse, finding it fails in mysterious ways).

> Seems like we can always do (b) in another language, so we can always 
> "get by" by having all args be strings for the moment.  Not pretty, but 
> it lowers the urgency of an immediate decision.

A 'numeric' type that makes no more constraint on its content looks very 
much like a string; but is still typed enough to know that you can use + 
or - or / or * on it. There's no shame in that.

You say:

> it lowers the urgency of an immediate decision.                               

but deciding (if we do or not) on this approach *is* the kind of decision 
that I'm looking for!

> I think also that at some point we'll need to reconcile whether we 
> support all (or more) of the primitive data types of XML Schema, which 
> has more numeric and date types.

'int' isn't even an XML Schema primitive type - its defined as a 
restriction of a more general type... Our present type model looks almost 
entirely unlike XML Schema.

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