Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

[Aaron Bartell <aaronbartell@xxxxxxxxx>]

For that specific example I would vote for overloading and not lose data
types.

In some ways we have this with implicit type casting if you pass by
VALUE/CONST, so maybe when dealing with the many "number" data types I don't
mind "looser" typing :-)  But I just don't see how allowing a number data
type to hold a character ever ends up in a good situation for the
programmer.  On that note, I do agree with the ease the Kevin Schroeder
mentioned of the implicit type casting happening when doing concats, but
even in that case the number var isn't necessarily storing a character value
- it is instead being converted to char so it can be sent to the browser.

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/


On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 4:29 PM, Scott Klement <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>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?
>
> You don't see the value in this, Aaron?