Re: Storing Numeric Values in the Database

There are adventages in dynamic typing, but also inconvenients. Staticaly typig allows to find errors at compile time, and that translates in more reliable at execution time.
Of course, with dynamic typing you can do extensive validation on the data, but your program will become very big. That will make it harder to maintain.

Jon Paris wrote:

On Sep 3, 2011, at 1:00 PM, midrange-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I don't see why a language cannot support both dynamic and static
typing. in effect, the RPG SQL pre compiler does that with the dynamic
sql that is embedded into the RPG code.

That isn't really what happens if you think about it Steve.

The SQL portion is only dynamic in the sense that the statement can be dynamically built etc. but in order to do anything with the data retrieved within the RPG context you have to associate named pre-defined host variable fields with the results of the queries.

There are languages - PHP for one - on the IBM i that are dynamically typed, why not use those. Of course it is possible to have the RPG compiler modified to handle dynamic typing as well as static but it isn't going to happen in any meaningful timeframe that I can see.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com