Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

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