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Axod may have overreached by saying "most languages". However, you overreach as well by saying "the minority" (though at least you add the qualifier "I'd expec

Axod may have overreached by saying "most languages". However, you overreach as well by saying "the minority" (though at least you add the qualifier "I'd expect".) What Axod perhaps should have said is "most languages that support automatic type coercion." We could have a flamewar all day about whether or not type coercion is a good or bad thing. And, actually, tumult's whole complaint could be summed up as type coercion is bad, and I don't get that object literals are different from string literals. Many languages with type coercion, where objects can be converted to a string via a toString method of some sort, behave the same as Javascript. At most, like php, they log a warning or notice of some sort. Personally, I prefer type coercion to throwing errors, and I prefer loose types to static types. Apparently, tumult doesn't, to the point of whining about the programming language that is the lingua franca of the web. To each his own.

ralph 17y ago
No, I'm sure it's the minority. I was just being polite. :-) "Today's" programming languages are a minority too. Just think of all the ones that came and went in the 60s, 70, and 80s. Most of those were ones that wouldn't let you do "foo" + 12 as the OP said, i.e. you couldn't apply the plus operator to a string and an integer and have the integer coerced to a string automatically. It's clearly the minority that would do that, and a small minority at that. awk and perl handle "foo" + 12, but they coerce "foo" to an integer, which is 0, and then add 12. (Note, C lets you do "foo" + 12 but it isn't coercing 12 to a string, instead it's adding 12 to the address of the string "foo", e.g. "0123456789abcdef"[nibble].) It would be interesting to enumerate those that do treat "foo" + 12 as if it was written "foo" + "12". Edit: add http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

ralph 17y ago

No, I'm sure it's the minority. I was just being polite. :-) "Today's" programming languages are a minority too. Just think of all the ones that came and went in the 60s, 70, and 80s. Most of those were ones that wouldn't let you do "foo" + 12 as the OP said, i.e. you couldn't apply the plus operator to a string and an integer and have the integer coerced to a string automatically. It's clearly the minority that would do that, and a small minority at that. awk and perl handle "foo" + 12, but they coerce "foo" to an integer, which is 0, and then add 12. (Note, C lets you do "foo" + 12 but it isn't coercing 12 to a string, instead it's adding 12 to the address of the string "foo", e.g. "0123456789abcdef"[nibble].) It would be interesting to enumerate those that do treat "foo" + 12 as if it was written "foo" + "12". Edit: add http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages