Re: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?

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?