From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net
In article <1081sk3$3njqo$7@dont-email.me>,
Simon Clubley wrote:
>On 2025-08-18, Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>> I happen to disagree with Simon's notion of what makes for
>> robust programming, but to go to such an extreme as to suggest
>> that writing code as if logical operators don't short-circuit
>> is the same as not knowing the semantics of division is
>> specious.
>
>That last one is an interesting example. I may not care about
>short circuiting, but I am _very_ _very_ aware of the combined
>unsigned integers and signed integers issues in C expressions. :-(
>
>It also affects how I look at the same issues in other languages.
>
>I've mentioned this before, but I think languages should give you
>unsigned integers by default, and you should have to ask for
>a signed integer if you really want one.
Whether integers are signed or unsigned by default is not
terribly interesting to me, but I do believe, strongly, that
implicit type conversions as in C are a Bad Idea(TM), and I
think that history has shown that view to be more or less
correct; the only language that seems to get this approximately
right is Haskell, using typeclasses, but that's not implicit
coercion; it takes well-defined, strongly-typed functions that
do explicit conversions internally, from the prelude.
But that's Haskell. For most programming, if one wants to do
arithmetic on operands of differing type, then one should be
required to explicitly convert everything to a single, uniform
type and live with whatever the semantics of that type are.
This needn't be as tedious or verbose as it sounds; with a
little bit of type inference, it can be quite succinct while
still being safe and correct.
- Dan C.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
