In article <s6yohb9mf4y.fsf@aalh02.alcatel.com.au>,
Chris Bitmead uid(x22068) <Chris.Bitmead@alcatel.com.au> wrote:
>
>If you're using string->number you're already doing fairly
>sophisticated programming. The naive user can input and output numbers
>without conversion.
>
>scheme
>> (* (read) 2)
>10
>=> 20
Okay, you want to put up a dialog box. You want to report the number in it.
In scheme, you must type number->string, which is very reasonable for
programmers -- you want to understand the difference between numbers and
strings. End-users don't. Thus I think that automatically coercing strings
is quite reasonable in in a scripting language. Unfortunately TCL has some
"gotchas" that makes it not perfect as a scripting language. REXX also has
some funny gotchas. Sometimes when you bend over too far trying to help
the user, your presumptions of what they want lead to many subtle errors.
Paul Prescod
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