Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott Klement wrote:
> For a subprocedure?   A reusable service that can be called from 
> anywhere?  I'd love to have it be able to use that parameter as any 
> different data type!
>
> As a trivial example, consider a procedure that inputs a date in MMDDYY 
> format and outputs it in YYYYMMDD format.  wouldn't it be nice if the 
> input value could be a date field, character string, unicode string, 
> zoned decimal, packed decimal or integer field?  So I don't have to code 
> a separate procedure for every single input type?
>   
That's not quite the same thing, Scott.  You're talking about 
essentially overloading the procedure by allowing different types of 
variable as a parameter (which you can do today by simply passing a 
pointer and a flag which indicates the variable type).  With dynamic 
typing, the variable itself has no context; whenever you want to process 
it, you first have to determine what's in it.  And in object-oriented 
programming it gets even worse because the variable can literally 
contain an object of any type.

Joe