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From: spg@alpha.sunquest.com (Steve Gibbons)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: improve world by dropping languages with ;
Message-ID: <14747@sunquest.UUCP>
Date: 26 Feb 91 07:30:53 GMT
References: <550@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu>
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In article <550@coatimundi.cs.arizona.edu>, gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes...
#In article  <3024@charon.cwi.nl> Guido van Rossum writes:
# 
#]For those who take the worn-out word "freedom" in their mouth in
#]response to this, think about strong typing.  Strong typing reduces
#]your freedom as a programmer.  Is this necessarily bad?
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^
# 
#Yes.
#--
#					David Gudeman
#gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
#noao!arizona!gudeman
The key word being necissarily, of course.  Should I tell you about MUMPS?
"No."  You say...
MUMPS, Don't ask me what it stands for (Something about Massechusets General
Hospital...)  _is_ an ansi standard language.  Like several (many/a few) other
languages, it primarily supports "strings."  (numbers [whether ints or floats]
are stored as strings and converted at computation time).

Anyway, a situation that occurred (once) is that line noise accidentally
embedded an "E" in a number, "no big deal" you say, "that's not a number. 
That's alphanumeric."  But this field just happened to look something like
"99E123455678901234" which the application attempted to convert to scientific
notation, a float.  It bombed with an "out of range" message.  (In a big way)

Off topic?  Maybe.  Sue me.  ;-)

Sven
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