What is LC's internal text format?

[Geoff Canyon]

I'll chip in and point out that the implicit conversion caused significant
hiccups in figuring out the offsets issues -- several people (including me)
were fooled by the fact that conversion to UTF-32 results in binary data,
but can be transparently treated as text. Or maybe I'm
mistaken/misremembering, which reinforces the fact that it's confusing. :-)

On Tue, Nov 20, 2018 at 10:25 AM Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode <
use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:

> This isn't about strongly typed variables though, but about when (correct)
> conversion is possible.
>
> LC throws an error if you implicitly ask it to convert the wrong kind of
> string to a number - for example, add 45 to "horse". (Obviously
> multiplication
> is fine: the answer would be "45 horses".)
>
> LC throws an error if you implicitly ask it convert the wrong kind of
> string
> or number to a colour: try setting the backcolor of a control to "horse".
>
> LC throws an error if asked to convert a number, or the wrong kind of
> string,
> to a boolean: try setting the hilite of a button to 45.
>
> In all these cases, LC knows it cannot do the right thing, so it throws an
> error to tell you so, rather than guessing, for example, what the truth
> value
> of "45" is.
>
> I'm just suggesting that it cannot know how to correctly convert binary
> data
> into a string - so it should throw an error rather than possibly
> (probably?)
> do the wrong thing.
>
>
> On 20/11/2018 17:55, Mark Wieder via use-livecode wrote:
> > On 11/20/18 8:33 AM, Ben Rubinstein via use-livecode wrote:
> >
> >> Would it not be better to refuse to make an assumption, i.e. require an
> >> explicit conversion?
> >
> > While I'd love to have the option of strongly typed variables at the
> scripting
> > level, I know better than to expect that this will ever happen.
> >
>
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