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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!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.
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?
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