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

[Mihael Hategan]

On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 14:52 -0500, Mike Wilde wrote:
> OK, I just reread the thread from the top, and have some thoughts on what our 
> alternatives are.
> 
> Some of the road forward depends on:
> 
> 1) whether we care about breaking current code
> 2) how well the current code can handle (or be taught) type coercions
> 
> If I had to pick a simple system, I'd pick either:
> 
> a) just strings
> b) just string and ints
> c) just strings and floats where floats act like ints when they have integral 
> values (many systems are like this)
> d) strings, ints and floats with fully manual coercions
> e) strings, ints and floats with reasonable auto coercions ala C
> 
> My pref would be (e) if thats easy to implement.
> 
> Forget what I said abut XML-Schema types earlier.
> 
> Do the choices above cover the range of reasonable choices?
> 
> What are the major open issues, give, say (e)?

I don't see many. I've been chatting with ben and decided it's probably
worth trying it on a separate branch.

> 
> - Mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ben Clifford wrote, On 7/20/2007 12:11 PM:
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
>